How To Ride Your Unicorn
by KillerGeishaYumi
Summary: Modern fic, somewhere between the book and movie universes; dragons are unicorns, and people do ride them, but the mode of taming and training them could use a little work. When a rare Black Unicorn is brought to the ranch, it takes a serious accident before anyone can ride it.
1. Night Fury

**Author's Note/disclaimer: I do not own _How To Train Your Dragon_ or the song "Black Unicorn." The former belongs to Cressida Cowell and DreamWorks, the latter...I don't remember, but it's not mine.**

* * *

_I am he that knocks on your windowpane;_

_I am he that stalks the night;_

_I am he with silver shot through my mane;_

_You'll dream of me with fire-eyes bright;_

_If you ever meet me standing there_

_You'll wish you were never born;_

_I'll seize your soul and strip it bare_

_I AM THE BLACK UNICORN!_

_..._

_My horn is forged of silver fire;_

_My shoulders bear leathern wings;_

_I am the nightmare of your own desire;_

_I am the song that the Devil sings;_

_Hellfire dancing in my eyes;_

_My coat is as black as coal;_

_Mortals are so quick to hypnotize_

_AND THEN I MERELY TAKE YOUR SOUL!_

_..._

_Teeth sharp as daggers cooled in the snow_

_And hooves that burn through the ground;_

_Follow me not where I lead you to go_

_For then your soul will be devil-bound;_

_There is but one who rides my back_

_And keeps his soul ever free;_

_His heart is cold and will not crack_

_AND HE IS AS CURSED AS ME!_

_..._

_I am he that knocks on your windowpane;_

_I am he that stalks the night;_

_I am he with silver shot through my mane;_

_You'll dream of me with fire-eyes bright;_

_If you ever meet me standing there_

_You'll wish you were never born;_

_I'll seize your soul and strip it bare_

_I AM THE BLACK UNICORN!_

* * *

Everyone at Berk Ranch knew that song. Everyone knew that of the five varieties of unicorn, Black Unicorns were one of two that were unbreakable. They and Frigid Unicorns were swift, maneuverable, and very strong; they could take a rider anywhere (whether the rider wanted to go or not) and could pull against the bit far stronger than any other. Frigid Unicorns could freeze the balls off a man if his drawers weren't adequately padded against their coats; Black Unicorns were worse, charging into the Woods That Howled with whoever was unlucky enough to stay on top. No one knew what happened after that, because no one who had gone in there atop a Black ever came back out again - it was said that the "howls" the woods were named for were the death cries of the Black Unicorn's victims.

Unicorns in general didn't breed well in captivity; new ones always had to be captured, from one of the many herds to run the Wilderwest. A man could possibly be forgiven for capturing a Frigid Unicorn among the others - provided he could prove he was color-blind (Frigid Unicorns were always gray-coated with molten horns, eyes, and hooves; all other unicorns had warmer coats and cooler keratin). There was no excuse for a Black, since no other unicorn's coat came nearly so dark nor their horns so light.

When Stoik Haddock saw the black beast charge howling out of the trailer, his face went so red that a great many of his workers ran for cover. The unbreakable unicorns _could_ in theory be trained by learning their language and speaking to them with it, but nobody had the time to unicorn-whisper these days. This Black was a filled stall and an extra mouth, and for what? Bragging rights? Not a man or woman could even sit up and pose on the thing. Well, perhaps Valka - but she'd been called away on an emergency much farther North and had gotten snowed in. Her wistful emails made it clear that she'd be home as soon as the roads were cleared, but with the state of the highway maintenance that could be months.

"Really, Spencer?" Stoik demanded.

Spencer smoothed his dark hair and looked haughtily at his brother-in-law. "This one's mine, Stoik; I'll have him trained down in no time."

"Really?" Stoik's tone slid towards skeptical. None of the tame unicorns on the ranch (or that had been sold off the ranch, for that matter) had ever been Spencer's; Hiccup had more success gentling unicorns. Why Spencer thought that he could do a better job as ranch head was a mystery to Stoik.

"Absolutely! I've done my homework on this piece of enchanted horseflesh..."

Now _that_ Stoik had to see to believe.

"...And I am completely ready to handle anything this baby can dish out."

Stoik rubbed his forehead. "Fine, but until it can take a rider its room and board are coming out of your salary."

That stopped Spencer short. "Ah, erm..."

For a moment, Stoik thought that he could order the Black released. Then Spencer regained his equilibrium.

"Deal!"

_It was a nice thought._ The man had enthusiasm, at least. "When can I expect to see your results?"

"I'll be riding him by the end of the week!"

Even if Spencer _had_ any skills at taming unicorns, he couldn't have pulled that one off: there were only three days left in the week. It took far longer than that to take a wild unicorn, put a saddle and bridle on it, and convince it to carry a rider without trying to kill him or her.

"Good luck with that," Stoik muttered, rubbing the bridge of his nose. As he turned away he heard the unicorn snap at Spencer's hand.

"I'm going to call you...Night Fury!"

* * *

Night Fury quickly became the bane of Spencer's existence. He would stab and kick whenever anyone tried to pet or curry him, he kept pulling his saddle blanket off and even trampled one to smoldering pieces under his fiery hooves, and he made it very clear that if his "leathern wings" were actually functional as more than steering aids he would fly away and never come back. Three days passed, then four, and very little progress had been made.

Hiccup could find it in his heart to feel sorry for the Black. Night Fury had never asked to be taken away from his old stomping grounds, or to have saddles and bridles buckled onto him. It was against his nature - against most ungulates' natures, surely - to carry weights on his back: what if it should be a predator up there? Big-cat griffins hunted unicorns, and so did wendigoes; both struck from above to sever the spine. It wasn't contrariness, it was very practical on the part of the unicorn. You didn't win his trust by jumping on his back - or, for that matter, by subterfuge: he would recognize a stalking predator from dodging werewolves in his natural environment.

No, it would have been better to put Night Fury with other unicorns that had already been mostly tamed, and let him get accustomed to the presence of humans by observing how the other unicorns handled their presence. _Then_, when he needed the humans' care himself, he would be more inclined to accept their voices and hands without a fuss. It was too late for that now: he'd been put in what was nearly equine solitary confinement, and he was now so badly spooked that he would likely start a fight if he was put with the others.

_What he most needs now is a friend_. Hiccup watched Night Fury pace restlessly in his own little enclosure and wondered if they had any unicorns able to handle a wound-up Black. Perhaps one of the Lowland Unicorns; they were the slowest, but the most enduring and most forgiving. His friend Fisk rode one on occasion...come to think of it, his dad's best friend had a rather large and lazy one. If either of them was willing to let their mounts keep this poor skittish creature company...

Hiccup's thoughts jarred to a halt when he realized the hoofbeats had stopped. Looking up, he saw that Night Fury was staring at him from a few paces away with trembling wings and turned-back ears.

_Don't move..._by all accounts, although all unicorns had better vision than horses, Black Unicorns couldn't see very well in bright light (which was probably one reason why Spencer was having such trouble). Night Fury would have an easier time establishing if Hiccup was a threat or not if the boy held very still.

Night Fury started forwards, one slow step at a time. His pale eyes were fixed on Hiccup, measuring the slight stature.

Hiccup carefully hefted himself up on the fence, putting his head closer to level with the unicorn's as the distance was closed and taking care to keep himself on his side of the fence. He kept his hands to himself - for now. The unicorns always told him when they were ready to be touched.

Finally, Night Fury brushed his nose against Hiccup's chest. He pulled a deep breath, drinking in the boy's scent; perhaps he was associating it with a nonthreatening creature, since Hiccup hadn't tried to grab his head or jump on his back. His ears flicked forward partway, and he drew his nose down the front of Hiccup's shirt.

Hiccup finally dared to lift a hand. Slowly, carefully, he brought his fingers level with Night Fury's horn (which was aimed right at his neck) and gently nudged it to one side. It burned his fingertips a bit, like a live wire with a low current; other unicorn horns weren't like that.

Night Fury's ears flicked, and he focused his eyes on Hiccup's face for a moment. Then, slowly and deliberately, he turned his head away.

Hiccup wasn't disappointed; particularly jumpy unicorns took time. This was admirable progress, that when he touched the horn this Black _didn't_ try to run him through and didn't run to the other end of the enclosure. He was simply walking away - along the fence, so that if Hiccup cared to he could probably hold his hand out and let Night Fury's movement turn it into a stroking gesture.

He didn't care to. That was taking things too fast.

Suddenly a hand closed on his belt and flung him over the fence. He tumbled through the air and landed on his back, his legs snagged on -

Night Fury's wings.

_Oh, no..._

Hiccup was on the back of a _Black Unicorn._ An _untamed_ Black Unicorn. With no saddle, no bridle, absolutely nothing to hold onto - and he'd never learned how to ride bareback. He had only about a quarter of a second to realize the horror of his position, and no time at all to think of a solution...

Small wonder that people thought the Black Unicorn was the Devil's own steed, if they had seen one trying to rid itself of a rider; even less of a wonder, had they found themselves in such a position and managed to escape with their lives. The moment Night Fury felt the slight but sudden weight on his back he went mad, bucking and thrashing in ways that were _like_ a horse but were simultaneously far beyond what a mere horse could do. All that kept Hiccup from getting stabbed was that the unicorn's very build prevented it from striking its horn too close to its own spine, and he was laying flat on that very spine. There was a terrible, explosive _crash_ as white-hot hooves kicked through the fence - and then, realizing that the way was clear, the Black ceased his bucking and was out the hole like a shot.

The last glimpse Hiccup had of the ranch that day, craning his neck to look upside-down, was of a burly dark-haired teen staring after them with his mouth hanging wide open in dismay.

_Scott. You lout, what did you think was going to happen?_ Hiccup didn't entertain any thoughts that the other boy was regretting throwing him on a unicorn's back; not when he'd done the exact same prank several times before, both to Hiccup and to the twins that visited. No, Scott was only regretting that his father's prize Black had broken free, leaving such wreckage in its wake that even more money would have to come out of the Jorgenson salary to fix it.

Then Hiccup focused all of his attention on staying on, and he prayed that at some point it would obviously be safe (at least relatively so) to unhook his legs from Night Fury's wings and dismount. Just now, they were moving way too fast.


	2. Wounded Hearts

Light...stabbing through his eyelids...did he fall asleep with the lights on? Or did he never make it to bed and was in one of the eastern rooms with the windows wide open? The latter seemed a bit more likely, as the air around him seemed to be...moving. Not quite wind, but not stillness.

God, but reasoning all that out made his head pound...and the light wasn't helping at all. He tried to roll away...

A scream tore from Hiccup's throat as pain wracked every corner of his body. Everything hurt to move, and his left foot was downright unresponsive. Silver lining, though: that wave of pain sent darkness crashing over his mind, not reducing him to unconsciousness but putting a temporary barricade between him and the unrelenting light.

_Did I fall off a unicorn?_

Through the fog, a glimmer of understanding...memory trickled back, a little at a time. That idiot Scott had thrown him onto a unicorn...onto Night Fury...and the Black had destroyed the fence and run off with him. _Betcha didn't know Black Unicorns could do that, huh, Scott? Your dad's going to be taking that fence out of your allowance for sure._ The wry humor seemed out of place here, but it was something normal.

Hiccup couldn't remember the ride itself. Probably just as well. And now...well, he was off the unicorn. Was he in the Woods That Howled?

He couldn't hear anything; it was like his scream had scared everything else into silence. The ground under him...didn't feel like much of anything, really. Just dirt, no leaves or pine needles - and no rocks of any size, at least not where he was. The smell was...

_Ugh..._

Blood, burned meat, and vomit. The combination made him feel rather sick, although the dry heaves his body painfully offered up didn't threaten anything worse. The vomit was probably his, from before he regained consciousness.

The light was back. It didn't seem _quite_ as bright as before, perhaps because his headache had faded slightly.

_Wait..._

That wasn't sunlight. Not for that time of year, anyway. It wasn't moonlight, it was too strong; it prickled against his eyelids and forehead - and nowhere else.

Confused, Hiccup let his attention focus on what was above his face.

Warm air blasted onto his chin with all the force of an exhale, bringing with it the scent of forest. There was something standing over him...something large. It snuffled his face, leaving cool patches as it inhaled - _drinking in his scent..._

A unicorn. It had to be; the mass looming over him was the right size and shape, now that he was focusing on it. And the light that was on his forehead and eyelids...the unicorn's eyes and horn. None of the three commonly-ridden unicorns could do that; Frigid Unicorns could, but not white light - and not this bright, either. Only a Black Unicorn could produce silver fire like a searchlight from its horn and eyes.

No way were there two Black Unicorns willing to be anywhere near a human. This was Night Fury. When he'd rid himself of Hiccup, he hadn't run away.

Hiccup pried his eyes open. Night Fury's face was so close to his own that the pale eyes blurred together, like a full moon in the night sky. The horn's base was pressed to his forehead, hard enough that if he didn't have a headache already he would certainly get one in a short time.

_Fire-eyes bright..._

They were dominating his vision...pulling him in...all he could see was white, spilling over the sides of the world.

It burned. Burned away the nausea, the headache - _all_ the aches and pains that had been accumulated over the course of the mad ride. It stripped him of...everything...leaving his body slack and his mind completely blank. He shivered, feeling more exposed than if he'd been caught naked by another human. And yet...he wasn't scared. In this strange, dreamlike state, he _knew_ that this deprivation was only temporary. His thoughts, his ability to think, would eventually return - or he would be killed quickly and without fuss. Either way, all his troubles would be over.

_Pain. Fear. Loneliness._

Like gravity, kindred spirits drew together in the void for comfort. Two hearts as one, beating in time and resonating with one another, drove away the aching emptiness both held but neither had truly acknowledged before.

A twinge of physical pain pulled Hiccup back into his body, and he blinked in surprise to find that he was standing; at some point during their communion he had taken hold of Night Fury's mane, and the unicorn had lifted him to his feet. He was still there, too, a solid bulwark to stand against since the boy's left leg wasn't supporting any weight.

_I don't like that name..._he'd seen this unicorn's heart, or thought he had. There was no "night" or "fury" there; it was a gentle soul.

It was dark. Somewhere between the start of the ride and...now...the sun had set. If not for the silvery shimmer in his mane and the glow from his eyes and keratin, the Black would be completely invisible in the shadows of...

Well, there were trees. They seemed to have fallen down a steep slope into a cove - Hiccup could see the shadow of a trench. They weren't getting back out again in exactly that direction.

"Toothless?" although his voice wasn't all that loud, it seemed to echo in the stillness.

The unicorn turned to stare at him.

_Okay, odd name..._but it was true, unicorns didn't actually use their teeth much in battle; it was all hoof-and-horn, especially since they all could use very simple magic through those things. Biting was generally reserved for their food, and it showed in the way their teeth and jaws were constructed - they weren't so much horse-faced as sheep-faced, or bovine, or any other ungulate that kicked their hooves and shoved with their heads long before they considered biting. Even the Blacks, with their fabled dagger-sharp teeth, had smaller and softer muzzles than horses. As far as real, earnest combat was concerned, they _were_ toothless.

"Can you take me home?" It seemed strange to ask of a beast, but Hiccup was sure this one would understand.

He did, too. Toothless considered for a long moment, tilting his head; he seemed to be wondering what would be in it for him, to go _back_ to that place where he was a captive. Then he closed his right wing with a snap and turned his head to look at his left.

Hiccup craned his neck to see - and stared in horror. The left wing was mangled; the sturdy bones that shaped it were snapped. There was no healing that, not now: that type of injury mended best if tended right after it happened. Even five minutes would have the straight bones jarred out of position just by the unicorn moving, and one sharp fracture would rip the wing to shreds at the first touch.

Hiccup knew at once what must have happened. At some point during the ride his right leg came unhooked from the Black's wings but not his left; with all of his weight being pulled on the left wing, Toothless's ability to use that wing would have been hindered. Unable to allow for the difference (or too panicked to realize he had to), he'd cut a dodge too close and ran up against an obstacle hard enough to cause structural damage - to both of them, probably, which would explain why Hiccup's leg wasn't working either.

Black Unicorns couldn't fly; only Highland Unicorns had enough elements in the right places to get off the ground and stay there. But they needed their wings to control their speeds - Blacks lived in forests so heavily wooded that no light reached the ground, which meant lots of tree trunks to avoid. If one had a broken wing, its maneuverability went way down; with a drop like that, it would either kill itself on the first failed attempt to swerve or be restricted to slower speeds. If it couldn't use its top speed, it was easy prey for werewolves, wendigoes, and anything else that might roam the woodlands looking for enchanted horse meat. One couldn't fight off enemies forever.

"I can make you a new wing." Hiccup seemed to recall being some sort of genius; he could make a prosthetic wing. Making one that allowed every possible movement a Black Unicorn could want right when he wanted it, and that Toothless could control on his own, might take years; it would be a long time before this Black could be wild again (if indeed it ever happened: a prosthetic would eventually require maintenance and/or replacement parts, no matter how well it was constructed, and Toothless lacked hands to repair damages). But he could run again.

Toothless accepted that. He settled down on his belly, making it easier for Hiccup to mount.

Hiccup took his unresponsive leg carefully by the knee and lifted it over Toothless's back - and he spared a quick look at it. Yup, he was pretty sure his leg wasn't supposed to bend like that between ankle and knee...and he thought he could see the broken ends of shinbones poking through the skin. There was something wrong with the angle of his foot, too. Well, at least now he knew where the burned-meat smell was coming from: Toothless had used horn-magic to partially cauterize the worst tears in his flesh, keeping him from bleeding to death in his sleep.

_That's my leg. I should be freaking out._ Except he wasn't; whatever Toothless had done to his mind a minute ago, it was holding him above the pain of his wrecked body and the fear that such extensive damage would warrant.

"Okay, Toothless," Hiccup said confidently, centering himself on the long back and clutching the dark mane, "Take me home!"

Toothless hoisted himself back up, scented the air, and started climbing up a wall of the cove that didn't look so steep as the one they'd fallen down.

Still no saddle or bridle...not like Hiccup had the faintest idea where they were in the first place. Better to just hang on and hope that the unicorn had some kind of "horse sense" of where Berk Ranch was.


	3. Running From The Hills

Scott pounded another nail into the new rail, with such ferocity that the first miss would pulverize his fingers. He felt aggrieved, as though the predicament he was now in was anyone's fault except his own.

Bad luck, that the stupid unicorn had managed to kick enough of the fence down to escape. Worse luck, that his dad had been coming out for another sullen observation of the beast he couldn't train at the time of the accident; he was there so fast that, even if Scott had been a particularly fast thinker (which he wasn't even at the best of times), he wouldn't have had time to hide and therefore escape the blame. Spencer Jorgenson had taken one look at his shocked son and the broken fence and instantly came to a conclusion that was nearly right: Scott had been tormenting the Black and it escaped. The boy found himself grounded before he could offer up a single word in his defense.

So now, here he was: no allowance and no riding for three months, _and_ he had to repair the broken fence. Bad enough, except that the rainy season would start a little before those three months were up and Hoofking wouldn't want to leave the barn even to spend saddle time with his rider.

_Stupid Inland Unicorns..._out of all five breeds, they were the only ones to truly hate getting wet. They ran for cover at the first scent of rain and often stayed in whatever shelter they chose until the ground dried.

Scott was very carefully _not_ thinking about the fact that Night Fury had run off with his cousin - he was in enough trouble just having the Black Unicorn's escape on his head. Eventually someone would notice that Harry, better known as Hiccup, hadn't come in for dinner or to bed and wasn't around the stables; when that finally happened, Scott fully intended to know nothing. The smart-mouthed little brat would eventually fade into a distant, vague memory, and then -

Pounding hooves got his attention. He looked up to see an approaching spotlight...

And howled as the hammer came down on his fingers. He was so busy shaking his hand out and blowing on the offending digits that he completely missed the shadowy steed rush by with its little passenger.

* * *

"Stoik, the Black's back!"

Stoik surged out of his chair, rounding on Gobber in astonishment. "The Black Unicorn? The one that Spencer had? Are you sure?"

Gobber shrugged. "Unless you can think of a reason why your son would be sitting on some other, completely wild Black..."

Although he must have nearly run down the man with two prosthetic limbs on his way to the door, Stoik had no conscious recollection of even getting to the outer rooms. He came back to proper awareness on the front porch, where the Black Unicorn was standing very still under the yard lights with a rather pale-faced boy whispering reassurances on his back.

"HICCUP!"

The unicorn reared up slightly, alarmed by the big man's emotion. Hiccup patted his shoulder gently.

"It's okay, Toothless, he's just worried about me." Hiccup looked down and smiled, looking a little off-kilter. "Hi, Dad...I didn't worry everyone these last couple hours, did I?"

Gobber stuck his head out the door. "Not really;_ I_ only started to wonder when you didn't show up for dinner. Where were you, boy?"

Hiccup's face lit up with a slightly hysterical lunacy. "Unicorn-whispering."

Spencer rushed around the corner and stopped short, staring in amazement. "Is that Night Fury?"

The Black snorted, glowering at the third adult.

"He doesn't like that name," Hiccup informed his uncle with a strangely...drunken sort of dignity. "His name is Toothless, and _I_ am taking responsibility for him. Dad, his left wing's broken - somebody will have to take it off before it catches on something, and I'm going to build him a new one. I can do that, right? I'm not just dreaming that I can figure that out?"

There was so much wrong with that entire sentence that Stoik took a long, hard look at his son's face. Hiccup's eyes were clouded over, his pupils dilated far too wide for the amount of light in the area; his expression wasn't _completely_ vacant, but he didn't look like he was fully grounded in the here-and-now. His quasi-regal posture was swaying slightly, as though the effort of holding his body erect was just barely in reach; like he was drunk, or drugged, or...

"Harold," Stoik was suddenly unsure that Hiccup would give a coherent response to anything but his full name, "Did you look that...Toothless...in the eyes?"

Hiccup's wide eyes refocused on his father. "Why? Do I look hypnotized?" His gaze wandered as he thought that one over. "I guess I am...I feel kind of weird..." he smiled dreamily and shrugged. "Probably a good thing; I'm broken too. We match, Toothless and I...but if he hadn't pulled me out of my head, I'd never have made it back for all the pain..."

At that exact instant Scott, having finished his assigned repairs, came back around the corner. The first thing his flashlight illuminated was the Black Unicorn's left side and the mangled leg hanging across it, and the shock was more than his stomach could take. Boy and unicorn both turned to look as Scott threw up.

"I did that already. Didn't I?"

Toothless rumbled softly, almost as if he was answering.

Gobber circled around Toothless's front, carefully patting his chest to let him know someone was there. "Okay, let's see what - Thor's Anvil!" He prodded carefully at Hiccup's twisted foot with his hook and called back, "Stoik, I don't think your boy's leg has any better chance than this here wing!"

Hiccup blinked down at Gobber. "My foot has to go, too?" He looked up at Toothless again. "We're _really_ going to match, aren't we?"

Toothless bobbed his head, looking for all the world like he was agreeing.

* * *

It took a while for everything to get sorted out. Hiccup and Toothless were each taken to their respective species' hospitals for immediate amputation (Toothless was dropped off first because Hiccup had to stay with him in the trailer and offer repeated reassurances that everything would be fine if he was a good boy), and after being kept overnight for tests and monitoring they were allowed to return to Berk Ranch. Both had weird reactions to the anesthetics; combining that with Hiccup's unicorn-induced trance, he spent most of the next day mumbling incoherently as his mind wandered in and out of who knew what dreams. Toothless wasn't much better, choosing to sleep the day away in his new stall with his head stuck in the feeding trough, but by that night he had recovered and made it very clear that he would stand outside the window to watch Hiccup's recovery if he had to kick through more fences and gates to do it.

"Let him," Stoik finally said with a weary sigh. "For all we know, he's telepathically blocking the phantom pains."


	4. Briefly Lacking In Horse Sense

Astrid had been on vacation when the fiasco with Toothless began. So when she came riding in and saw the one-winged Black Unicorn standing outside a window on the North side of the house - in broad daylight - she was understandably a little shocked and waylaid Fisk for information. He was happy to share as much as he knew on the subject, which was a fair amount since Hiccup had recounted the events twelve times in the last week (never seeming to notice or care that he was repeating himself).

"How is he now?" Astrid finally asked as the big boy ran out of steam.

"Better...he's not walking yet even on crutches - he suffered a _lot_ of damage besides the leg - but he's eating well for an inactive adolescent and he doesn't seem to be in any pain."

"How about his brain?"

Fisk hesitated. "Uh...I mentioned that he'd been hypnotized, right?"

"Yeah. So?"

"So...he's still hypnotized. Oh, he's still Hiccup...but he's Hiccup with no filters and no brakes. He hardly stops talking for anything, and at least once I heard him addressing an empty room like half the ranch was visiting him - complete with answering what they were supposedly saying. He's not all that coherent, either." Fisk shrugged. "It's like he's spending all of his time in this weird dimension halfway between awake and asleep."

Astrid's eyebrows lifted in an expression of mild alarm with a hint of amusement. Hiccup was hard to shut up even when he wasn't hypnotized; it was often easier to nod and pretend you were listening. "Has he said anything embarrassing yet?"

"N-no...or if he has, it was under the heading of 'incoherent,' so I couldn't compound his embarrassment by repeating it."

Fisk was a lousy liar; Astrid could tell that he wasn't telling the whole truth. Still...she didn't press. Fisk was one of Hiccup's few real friends on the ranch.

"Could I see him, do you think?"

"Uh - sure! He's not exactly hiding, just...find the room with the Black Unicorn outside the window."

_Now why would it be so awkward that I want to see our resident Unicorn Whisperer?_ She didn't ask, though, instead going to see for herself.

* * *

Hiccup favored Astrid with the biggest smile she'd ever seen on him when she walked in the room. Someone had moved his bed downstairs into the living room, where he had a fabulous view of the large picture window and Toothless. He certainly looked comfortable, as well as half-asleep.

"Hey, Astrid...I dreamed about you last night. Was that a dream? You were right there on the ottoman and I was in the recliner and then...mm-hmm..."

"I just got here an hour ago," Astrid hurried to clarify, before Hiccup could muster his concentration enough to properly finish that sentence. "I heard you made a new friend while I was gone."

"Toothless, yes!" Thus distracted, Hiccup pointed excitedly at the window. "We go riding every night!"

Toothless rapped on the window with his horn, either agreeing with Hiccup or saying hello to Astrid.

Hiccup didn't look like he'd moved from his bed in days. Remembering what Fisk said about what "dimension" Hiccup was in, however, Astrid decided to let that one slide. "Sounds like fun."

"It is!" Hiccup's hand waved randomly in the air above his head. "We jumped the moon last night!"

Astrid's eyebrows lifted to her hairline, and a sardonic remark fell out of her mouth before she could ask herself if calling him on a continuity error was a smart move or not. "I thought I was here last night." She sat down on the ottoman by his feet. "Right here."

Foot. He only had one foot. She wondered if he'd acknowledged that in his private universe. It was strange, seeing the blanket so smooth where there was supposed to be a second lump.

"Yes..." It was some kind of wrong, how he could still sound so rational and so much like everyone else in the world were the idiots when everything that was coming out of his mouth was so utterly nonsensical. "_We_ jumped the moon." Both hands waved, including her in his pronoun.

"From the ottoman?" Astrid wondered how much more of this she could take without laughing. Or screaming. Hiccup was supposed to _make sense_.

"Uh-huh..._you_ came up _here_ and..." words failed him as his hands drifted along slow curves in the air. "Mmm...hmmm...yeah, let's do that again."

Astrid looked blankly at Toothless for a moment before returning her attention to the temporarily-insane amputee. "Um, even if I knew what you were talking about, I'm not sure the body you have in this reality is up to the challenge."

Hiccup crossed his arms and pouted like a sulky toddler. "Well, of _course_ it's not; it's one-legged and bruised to high hell."

Well, at least he knew about it.

A smile tugged at his mouth. "Can't stop me thinking about it, though..."

Astrid eyed Hiccup suspiciously. "What _did_ we do last night, _exactly?_" That tone would have had a fully-sane Hiccup running for the hills.

_This_ Hiccup just smiled at her like a doofus. "You have such beautiful blazing eyes..."

_Okaayyyy...maybe it's my turn to run for the hills._ Except for one thing: Astrid Hofferson did not "run for the hills." She stood her ground.

"So..."

"Half the unicorns in the paddock would kill for that hair..."

"Hiccup..."

"And the curves..." Hiccup squinted. "Did you put on a little weight? I don't remember you being quite so full-chested..."

Astrid banged her head on the bedpost, reminding herself firmly of all the reasons pounding him was a bad idea - heading the list was actually that it was a waste of effort, since he was obviously stoned. _I really need to consider leaving for _my_ sanity's sake._

Hiccup nudged her with his good foot. "Don't do that, there's nothing wrong with your chest. I like it that way." His eyes roved along her back and he grinned. "Also that ass of yours..."

Astrid jerked up. "What?" she demanded, somewhere beyond astonished. Was _Hiccup_ going where she thought he was going?

"Your thighs rock...athletic _and_ sexy. Seeing you guide Stormfly around the range with just your hot legs..."

"Okay, either you need to shut up or I need to leave. You'll already be humiliated when you come back to your senses."

"Ah, he's not going to remember this..." Hiccup settled back into the pillow, looking decidedly happy. "You're as cute as a unicorn..."

Was _that_ a compliment? _Probably; half his life revolves around unicorns. He loves working with them._

"...And just as dangerous." Hiccup's eyes fluttered closed.

"And don't you forget it," Astrid growled half-heartedly, wondering if he even heard her.

Ruth had joked on numerous occasions that Hiccup had far more than platonic feelings for Astrid.

Looks like she wasn't kidding. In fact, she might have been underestimating - although knowing both twins' penchants for exaggerating, that wasn't likely.

_I wonder if these days under unicorn-trance really are going to be a big blank for him..._

* * *

**_Author's__ Note: _**_This chapter was SO MUCH FUN TO WRITE! ^_^ And yes, Ruth is Ruffnut. Any suggestions for Tuffnut's normal name?_


	5. Dawn's Early Enlightenment

_**Author's Reply To Certain Comments (in order of reception)... **_

_**Fragments of Imagination/LorreVarguhl - **You're in luck. :)  
_

**_Brenne - _**_I wondered if anyone would catch that. Toothless doesn't understand human speech well enough to form words through someone else right now; the "he" is actually "out-of-trance Hiccup,"__ so he's basically talking about himself in third person._

_**Rumbling Night Cutter - **You're not too far wrong. In a nebulous chapter 0, Scott hands out some similar compliments to Astrid and gets completely throttled._

**_Raberba girl -_**_ I can't even read aloud some of the stuff I wrote without having to stop and laugh! =D And yeah, when I have a more spelled-out plot, I can make chapters go farther; my other HTTYD fanfic had a chapter that broke 5,000 words. I _am_ making a point to get every one of this fic's chapters at least over 1,000 words (and for _this_ chapter, I'm subtracting comment-replies from that minimum total). By the way, this is as far as I have the established plot going, so I can start taking suggestions for more chapters or if I should end it here._

**_storyholder - _**_nope, no experience being high; I credit chapter 3 of "Braced" by Foxy'sGirl for the layout of that conversation (in her fic, it had been Astrid that was high on actual drugs and she came out of it in the same chapter with no memory of anything she did or said while under)._

* * *

Hiccup jarred awake from a sound sleep. It felt like something had smacked him in the head; not hard enough to hurt, or at least it didn't hurt long enough for his brain to really process it as pain, but it was disorienting. He sat up - or tried to - and looked around.

There was no one there; it was dark, save for the light coming in the window from Toothless's horn and eyes. Everything was very, very quiet, and a little chilly.

_What time is it?_ Probably it was very early in the morning...yeah, that would explain a lot. Everybody had been in bed for hours by now, so all the lights were off and the thermostat had been turned down. Only the Black Unicorn was still awake, watching him.

_Hey...my head feels normal._ That must have been the smack: Toothless putting him straight. Clearly, the unicorn didn't give a darn about "time of day," and just ripped the trance away as soon as he sensed that it was no longer needed.

And it wasn't needed. Hiccup stretched his body until his back popped and the blood roared in his ears, delighting in movement; there were no warning twinges from any of the bruises, minor lacerations, or cracked bones. There was something to be said for holding still...for days on end...

_How long was I out of it?_ That was probably the part he liked the least about being under, now that he was back up: it probably had been at least a week since Toothless ran off with him and then brought him back, but so much of that time was drowned in a fog that he could only reckon up three or four days. Also - although this bothered him slightly less - now that he was in full command of his senses he realized that some of the things he remembered were...rather strange.

Just for starters, a long conversation he had with his mother about Toothless: unless she'd returned home at some point while he and Toothless were off the ranch, that couldn't possibly have happened for real. Not to mention, he found it hard to believe that all the ranch hands would take the day off at once just to listen to him talk - his father would never allow it. Those were the obvious dreams; then there were lots and lots of more likely chats, with his dad and Gobber and Fisk, so strange that he wondered if he'd dreamed _them_. And then...

"Oh, my God," Hiccup gasped, covering his face with both hands.

He had several dreamlike memories of Astrid, ranging from simple talks (in which he confessed things that he would _never_ say to _anyone_, much less _Astrid_, under normal circumstances) to her sitting in his lap in the recliner or snuggling up in his bed with him, fondling his hair while he ran his hands over her sides and back..._and_ they'd kissed...

_Please let all of those be dreams, please let all of those be dreams..._

Hiccup couldn't quite see how the making-out could be anything except a dream; Astrid wasn't a sit-in-a-guy's-lap kind of girl and definitely wasn't a jump-in-a-guy's-bed kind of girl. But the talks? According to his fuzzy memories, everyone else had come to see him at least once (and he could see all of them taking turns looking in on the Unicorn Whisperer), so why not Astrid?

Toothless knocked on the window, startling him out of his panic.

"I didn't make too big an idiot out of myself, did I?" Hiccup asked aloud.

There was something...like a whisper, or a flicker of light in his mind. Toothless didn't see what all the fuss was about - Hiccup just communicated the honest compliments that were in his heart. So what? It was flattering to a female for a male to appreciate all the parts of her.

"Unless she doesn't _want_ a certain male's appreciation about _any_ parts of her," Hiccup muttered, remembering about a month ago when Astrid knocked Scott over the hitching post for flirting. He looked down at the foot of his bed and tried to figure out what was wrong with his view.

Right. There was supposed to be a left foot there.

Astrid wouldn't hurt a one-legged guy, would she? It wouldn't be fair. And she especially wouldn't hurt a one-legged guy who happened to be Unicorn Whisperer at the ranch she worked on, and whose father _owned_ said ranch she worked on; that would get her fired. So...even if he did say...everything he remembered saying, and she took offense, he was probably safe.

Physically, at least.

She'd probably ignore him, but what was new about that?

"Did I tell anybody that Scott threw me onto you?"

"I thought I heard your voice."

Hiccup turned his head so fast he nearly put a crick in his neck, and found himself squinting at a flashlight. "Astrid! Hi Astrid, hi Astrid, hi Astrid..."

"You sounded more intelligent when you were talking to the unicorn." Astrid sat down on the ottoman - that cursed ottoman - and aimed her flashlight at the ceiling. She looked ghostly in the reflected light, especially since she was wearing a nightshirt instead of her usual riding attire with studded shoulder pads. Delicate, not scary.

"Um. What time is it?"

"That's better...it's almost five, I think."

People would be up soon; ranch work started before dawn, half the year.

"So you're back with us all the way, then?"

"Yeah..." Hiccup rubbed his forehead. "That was what woke me up." He squinted at her. "Why are _you_ up, anyway? Why are you...why were you close enough to hear me talking to Toothless?"

"Since you came home from the hospital, your dad's been rotating the hands on Hiccup night-watch; so that if something went drastically wrong, there would be someone with hands ready to help you." Astrid shrugged. "Tonight was my turn, that's all."

Hiccup counted the days in his head. Anything, to not think about the maybe-dreams with Astrid in them. "So I've been sitting here a month."

"Pretty much."

"Feels like a month." Hiccup stretched again, trying to shift his hips.

"And I don't know if you said anything about Scott; If you didn't, well, he's already in a lot of trouble over the broken fence and everything." Astrid's mouth twitched. "He misses you."

Hiccup stared, incredulous. "What?" That was beyond weird; Scott didn't have any affection for his cousin...

"Horn-clipping doesn't go as smoothly without you there to convince the unicorns that they need to lose the last couple inches or so."

"Oh." And, once again, the world made sense.

Unicorn horns grew like a bunch of paper cones, all the same size after full maturity, stacked on top of each other. When an entire cone was farther away from the head than a meter, it withered and dropped off; humans harvested the cones a little sooner than that, when the tip broke that meter length, because then the magic that made the horn so valuable would still be mostly intact. Different horns had different uses; counter-intuitively (though appropriately), the magical element concentrated within each horn was what was _lacking_ from their habitats. Highlanders' horns had the magic of Earth, Lowlanders' horns had the magic of Air, and Inlanders' horns had the magic of Water - Frigids' and Blacks' horns weren't as well known (since hardly anyone tried to domesticate them and it was nearly impossible to harvest from an untamed unicorn), but the theory most commonly accepted was that they held two different versions of Fire magic.

Hiccup and Fisk agreed that it went back to survival adaptions, allowing them to store the scarce element in concentration; this was important because all unicorns tended to live in places where one scarce element made it difficult for plants to grow and thrive in abundance. Not even the Black Unicorn was immune to that problem - in fact, if they didn't have the equivalent of raw sunlight in their horns, their troubles would have been especially ironic: surrounded by healthy foliage dense enough to block daylight, and not a bite to eat because the trees held it all on branches that were too high and only dropped it when it no longer had any nutritional value.

"When was the clipping?"

"We started yesterday. Probably would have been done yesterday, too, if you'd been in any shape to help." Astrid cocked her head. "Can I get you anything?"

"Crutches?" He was tired of lying down.

"Unless you absolutely _need_ to get up for...anything, I'd rather wait until a few more people were moving around before I turn all the lights on. I don't know where the crutches ended up, I wasn't here when you got home."

Reading "anything" as "a trip to the bathroom," Hiccup considered how that department felt and decided that it wasn't urgent...except he half-expected that the minute he was upright and moving, it would become urgent. Trying to hurry for the bathroom during his first time with crutches...

"I absolutely _need_ to get up," he said slowly, "But if you're willing to hold me up, I think we can skip the top-to-bottom search."

Astrid considered for a long moment, fixing him with that unnerving stare. Finally she nodded and stood up, whipping his blanket away.

"Hey - " Well, at least he had shorts on. _Thank you, whoever made sure I was at least semi-clean, for making sure I was also modest._ He remembered snippets of that, although half of them were so ludicrous that he wondered if he kept falling asleep in the tub and dreaming about his baths.

"Well, come on, then." Astrid knelt partway and offered her right shoulder for him to grab.

Hiccup took a deep breath and caught her arm. Before he could truly get set she grabbed his hip with her other hand and hauled him out of bed up to his foot.

The room spun unsteadily; if Astrid's arm hadn't closed around his waist, he was sure he would have ended up on the cold stone floor. After a moment a rapping got his attention.

"I'm okay, Toothless," he called.

The rapping stopped.

"When your dad's up, maybe you could get a better look at Toothless's horn," Astrid commented as they started towards the bathroom. "I can't tell if it's too long or not, but he's been here a month..."

"A little more than a month, actually," Hiccup muttered, focusing on the hallway.

"...And it is quite the horn. He might need a few layers off."

"I'll mention it. Did anyone measure..."

"Fisk tried. He wouldn't hold still."

Hiccup grinned. "Which, Fisk or Toothless?"

Astrid smirked. "I think your friends are a little scared of each other."

By the time they reached the bathroom door, Hiccup's bladder had woken up with all the hopping he'd been doing and was letting him know that it was rather urgently full. Astrid manhandled him to the toilet and then left, turning on the lights and closing the door behind her.

Hiccup didn't want to think about Astrid being on the other side of that door as he worked his shorts loose; it made him tense, remembering those maybe-dreams about her. He was only able to relieve himself when he concentrated hard on believing that she'd left to get herself a drink.

_I wonder when I'm getting a prosthetic._ That would be nice, not having to use crutches everywhere. Besides, then he could have an attachment for holding onto a stirrup or something...

Getting the shorts back up was more awkward than getting them down had been; he wound up falling on the floor, jarring his short leg painfully against the tub.

"Are you okay in there?" Either she was back, or she'd never left.

"Fine!" As long as he was down, he got his shorts all the way on. "But I can't get up. Can you..."

Astrid opened the door, looked the situation over, and dragged him unceremoniously to his foot. "Better?"

"Yeah..."

They started their slow trek back to the living room.

"Astrid?"

"Hmm?"

"Did you...come and visit me while I was...out of it?"

"A few times. Don't you remember?"

"I...the entire month since the accident has been like one long dream. And some of it I _know_ was a dream, and some of it..."

"Oh yeah," Astrid helped him into the recliner and looked him straight in the eyes. "Are you ever going to tell me how you think we 'jumped the moon'?"

Hiccup's eyes widened. "Um, okay, that part really _was_ a dream, then? I, uh, wondered..."

"So..."

"Nothing! Nothing...happened, it was just a dream..." Hiccup grinned helplessly at Astrid. "I mean, you wouldn't...uhm, yeah...for any reason at all, right? Then every time that happened, it was just a dream."

"How many times?"

"I...said it was like one long dream, right?" Hiccup wanted to crawl under something at this point. He really did remember how many times Astrid supposedly made out with him: seven times exactly, three times in the chair and four in the bed, although they didn't do the same things every time. He just didn't want to say that to Astrid. That would be pathetic, right?

Suddenly Astrid smiled - rather like a predator staring down prey, but she did at least look amused. "So you really like my blazing blue eyes?" Then she winked and swept away, leaving Hiccup gaping like a fish after her.

He'd said that more than once in his hazy memories; the first time it was a brief mention at the start of a rather embarrassing list of compliments, and the second time it was practically a soliloquy in itself.

If he assumed that half of the "just talking" memories he had with Astrid were for real...then she would have heard at least some of his feelings about her. She knew...

_She's laughing at me!_ Well...at least he was providing her with some entertainment...and she hadn't directly threatened him...

She had to be walking like that on purpose, drawing his attention to her bare legs; she never strutted like that unless she intended to. If she really didn't like that he ever looked at her legs (and that had come up too many times for her to have missed _all_ of them), would she really be prancing for him? Man, that nightshirt was awfully short considering the thermostat...or did someone turn it up? Hiccup sure seemed to be overheating, and was rather glad the blanket was still on the bed.

_Maybe this will be okay after all._


	6. First Big Step Forward

When Hiccup limped out of the house after breakfast, it was under his own power. His dad had just had the crutches in the corner behind the recliner - if Astrid had aimed her flashlight at the wall next to the big window, she'd have seen them.

Not that Hiccup planned to tell her that, or where they'd been unless she asked: he couldn't think of any way to do so that wouldn't sound like he was insulting her observation or intelligence. She probably did think he was funny, but there were undoubtedly limits.

"Hiccup!" "Hey, Hiccup!"

Ruth and Tully charged up to the porch, both talking at once.

Before Hiccup could make any sense of what they were saying - and before he could do more than lift his hands to beg they not run him over - Toothless rounded the corner with enough speed that he startled both twins into falling over each other getting out of his way.

"Hey, Toothless..." Hiccup petted the broad black shoulder, "This is Ruth and Tully. Don't worry, they're...more a danger to each other than they are to me." Since at that exact instant they were wrestling with each other trying to get back up, they were kind of proving his point.

Toothless snorted, sending a sparkle of amusement into Hiccup's head over "young foals" or something to that effect.

Fisk rode up on his Lowland Unicorn, Meatlug, and stopped a safe distance from Toothless. "Hi; nice to see you standing. Surprising, but nice...after a month in bed, I'd think you'd be in pain just moving."

Hiccup shrugged. "I wasn't in it full-time." Some of that had been clarified for him over breakfast. He'd been fetched out of his bed for baths, to relieve himself, and eventually for physical therapy and to sit at the table for meals; essentially, the only reason he spent so much time either in bed or in the recliner was because that between the damage to his body and the trance he'd been under he _couldn't_ move around much on his own.

Fisk nodded at Toothless. "Gobber finished that...thing you were drawing."

Memory kicked in before Hiccup could say anything embarrassing like _I was drawing something?_ Of course he was: he spent the entire month - every time he'd been sitting at the table, in fact - working on blueprints for a prosthetic wing for Toothless. It seemed that being in that trance meant he'd instinctively known the exact weights and measurements he needed to use, because he never did have to ask anyone to try and measure the Black's remaining wing. Controlling mechanisms were designed for the stirrup, rather than for some kind of joystick; he needed both hands on the range, to handle reins and rope horns, so if he was to maintain or even surpass his usual productivity as a hand he had to be able to do that at full gallop.

"Great; we'll go check it out." Hiccup paused, trying and failing to call up an accurate memory of one little detail... "Did I design a prosthetic for myself as well as for Toothless?" He was sort of lacking a foot to operate a stirrup.

Fisk shrugged. "I don't know; I never saw the finished blueprints. Never saw the finished piece, either, Gobber just told me to tell you."

It would be just like Gobber to hide the "finished piece" before asking Fisk to relay any message, anyway, so that the good-natured boy couldn't spoil a surprise.

Hiccup tapped Toothless's shoulder. "Down."

To the surprise of both twins, the great beast settled next to the porch and closed his wing as though he'd been trained his whole life what "down" meant, and he stayed down as Hiccup awkwardly clambered up and crossed the crutches over his mismatched shoulders.

"Up."

With a rush of air they rose straight up - so steadily that if Hiccup had been holding a tray of drinks, none of them would have even sloshed.

"Okay, _nobody_ _else_ will ever be able to get _him_ to do _that_," Ruth said.

"Yeah, no kidding; he's the cursed rider!" Tully agreed - for once.

Hiccup smirked wryly at the twins before looking back at Toothless's ears. The merest touch of a finger on the black shoulder, and they were headed towards the workshop.

* * *

Gobber waved at Hiccup and Toothless as they stepped inside. Toothless looked warily around, not certain what to make of being in a room; he hadn't been _inside_ anything since two trailer rides and two days in stalls, and for most of that he'd been anesthetized. Still, he was better about it than most other barely-trained unicorns - Blacks lived in more enclosed spaces in the first place.

"I'm told you finished turning my blueprints into reality?"

"Yup, one custom saddle with wing attachment all ready to go!" Gobber uncovered his worktable. The saddle was no fancier than another unicorn saddle, but it did have extra straps on the front to secure a metal-and-leather wing to the neck and shoulder of the unicorn wearing it.

Toothless turned his head to stare at the wing in surprise. He evidently hadn't been expecting it to be red.

Neither had Hiccup, to be honest. "Red?"

Gobber shrugged. "It's what was on hand." Then he smirked up. "So, can you get down from there on your own?"

"Toothless, down." Then he had to grab for his crutches as the unicorn knelt - smoothly, but quickly.

"Ah, one would think he was born here." Gobber considered the red-and-black blanket in his hands. "Astrid suggested putting this on as a saddle blanket; you good with that?"

Hiccup blinked. "Why would I care what blanket..." he looked again at the blanket and suddenly recognized it. "That was on my bed while I was...out of it."

"Do you remember, before, how Toothless here wouldn't keep a blanket on his back for the saddle? Astrid's theory was that if it was a blanket he knew and associated with his best buddy, both by seeing it through the window and by smelling you on it, he would leave it be."

Not a bad theory at all; they did variations on that with the other unicorns they trained, by hanging up the saddle blankets in the barn for them to see. By the time the blankets were put on someone's back, they'd soaked up all the unicorn scent they could hold and so were also a familiar smell. Valka had started making saddle blankets out of unicorn hair, too, which needed even less time for their users to familiarize with by sight and smell.

"Sure, why not?" Hiccup readied his crutches and wobbled backwards, safely out of Gobber's way. Toothless was instantly wary, on his feet and staring at Gobber with his ears back.

Gobber approached the unicorn, not swiftly but sure, and with no attempt at stealth. "Steady there, big fella..." a moment later, the blanket was on Toothless's back.

Toothless slowly turned his head and stared at the blanket, his nostrils flaring. By that point he _had_ seen other unicorns all saddled up; Meatlug and Stormfly had both been introduced to him, while they were being ridden. Surely they were able to communicate that there was nothing wrong with having blankets cinched to their backs; in fact, the blanket was for the benefit of any animal to ever wear a saddle. And he would know this blanket...

For a long moment, no one moved. Then Toothless looked away, as though it didn't matter that there was a blanket back there.

Hiccup let out a breath. "Good boy, Toothless."

"Here..." Gobber reached behind the saddle and lifted up a hunk of metal and plastic. "Get this on and you can help saddle him up."

"So I did design a leg for me? I couldn't remember..." Hiccup took the leg and turned it around in his hands.

"Well, you designed a foot; had to consult with your specialist for the part that went under your knee."

Hiccup _did_ remember that specialist being by a time or two; he figured without being told that those were real, because why would he hallucinate about a middle-aged lady he'd only met right before the operating table?

"She was very impressed with the amount of...adjustability you put in there. Figured that if that setting caused you pain, you'd be able to tweak it yourself until it didn't hurt anymore."

"She's probably right." It took a couple tries, but Hiccup managed to get the leg strapped on. Was it supposed to feel like his shoelaces were tied too tight? Was that something he had to get used to? He couldn't fasten it more loosely; it had to be secure, or it would rub his stump raw. Like ice skates.

_I'm never going ice skating again._

At least he hadn't been good at it.

Hiccup took a deep breath and hauled himself upright, standing firmly on two feet. Foreign sensation rippled up his short leg, and he wobbled slightly as he walked slowly over to Toothless...but he had successfully stood and walked.

Toothless nodded and made a noise like he was pleased. The colt was walking.

"Okay...let's get you saddled up, bud."

* * *

Riding hurt. But it felt good to have a proper saddle under him with the wind in his face.

Toothless was raring to go at his fastest; Hiccup had to keep reining him in, reminding him to _gradually_ speed up while his rider got the feel of the wing. It wasn't going badly, though - walking had been harder than this. Maybe he needed two prosthetic legs, one for walking and one for riding.

A rust-colored Highland mare charged up alongside them, with Astrid on her back. After a bit two yellow Inland stallions joined in with the twins riding them. For several long minutes they all ran around the range together, with the unicorns enjoying themselves as much as the riders. Then they reined in and started back.

"I think he does need trimming," Astrid commented as she drew abreast of Hiccup, indicating the horns; Toothless's was longer than Stormfly's, and aside from exact breed there wasn't much difference between the two unicorns. Stormfly must have had hers trimmed the day before.

"I noticed." Hiccup considered the ranch ahead of them for a moment. "Highlanders' horns are ground up and added to fertilizer; Inlanders' horns go in water purifiers, and Lowlanders' horns work great in air fresheners. All three have their place in medicine. What could we do with Toothless's horn trimmings?"

"I don't know. You and Fisk are the smart ones around here."

Hiccup chuckled. "I get mine from Mom." Then he gave the question some thought. "I wonder if it would improve the lasers used in surgery...maybe my dad can get me some time with a specialist in that field, see if anything can be done with it."

"That's medical." Astrid sounded approving. "How about elsewhere?"

"Alternative lighting?" Hiccup shrugged. "I'll have to think about it; see what we have when we clip his horn."

* * *

Once the unicorns were all back in the barn, unsaddled and fed, they started back for their own lunch. Ruth and Tully charged ahead, arguing about which of them would reach the table first; Astrid kept pace with Hiccup.

"Hey," Astrid began - hesitant for once, "There was something I thought I noticed that first day...about your face."

"Besides that I was staring at you like an idiot?" Hiccup asked wryly.

"Yup. Did...when Toothless hypnotized you, did he touch your face? With his horn?"

Self-consciously Hiccup reached for his forehead. "Yeah...not with the point, it was a lot closer to the base...why?"

"Because I think he...burned you. I didn't want to sit on your lap to get a better look while you were still loopy - and then, this morning, it was dark. But..."

"I haven't looked in a mirror yet." Hiccup stopped walking and brushed his bangs aside. "As long as we're both standing here, and there's no one else around...why not?"

Astrid looked curiously at Hiccup. Then she gently took hold of his face and turned it towards her. "What?" she asked when he trembled.

"Nothing...just...flashbacks to the living room." His voice dropped to a mutter. "And that stupid ottoman..."

"Did I kiss you?"

"No - " except his voice sounded so strangled even to his own ears that he knew she'd never believe that. "Well...yes...but mostly you just...petted me like a kitty, I guess."

Astrid smiled a bit and teased her fingers through his hair. "Like this?"

Hiccup made a high little noise like he was trying not to moan, and he shivered so violently that Astrid relented for the sake of his still-unsteady balance.

"Yeah, there is something here." She traced her fingers over a straight line down his forehead, and then along a curve near the top; something like an upside-down bell, branded there by the edges of the horn's cone-ridges.

Tracing a pattern on his forehead wasn't much better for his shivers than the fingers through his hair, but he was better able to stand still and let the tingles wash over him. It felt nice. "I wonder if it's permanent," he murmured.

"It's still there after a month."

"I guess it is, then." He tried to decide if that was good or bad.

"Your bangs kind of hide it; you'd never see it if you didn't already know it was there." Astrid took her hands down quickly, realizing that she was gently combing the edges of his scalp.

"You didn't have to stop that - I mean, if you didn't want to." Hiccup roused himself and blinked at Astrid. "I was...well, uh, that was nice. Relaxing."

"Well..." Astrid tried to look like she didn't care, but the look she gave him out the corner of her eye seemed to hint that she'd been enjoying petting him as much as he'd enjoyed being petted. "We _do_ have to go get lunch."

"Right...lunch." They started walking again. "That was the kind of thing my mom would do when I was younger, and it helped me fall asleep...if I had a headache or something."

Another sideways look. "That's a little...weird."

Hiccup shrugged slightly. "I looked it up once: it's ASMR."

"What?"

"Uh...autonomous sensory meridian response," he sounded out carefully. "Practically no one ever calls it that, though. There are whole communities for it on YouTube - people who make videos designed to trigger ASMR, and people who watch them. Basically, there are some types of sensory stimuli that cause this...tingling. It feels amazing, it's relaxing..."

Astrid made a face.

"Agh, never mind." Hiccup shook his head, wondering why on earth he was trying to explain this. If she didn't get it, she didn't get it.

_I should show her a video..._ Oh, yeah, and _that_ would go well: most of the ones he watched were done by some girl named Heather.

Astrid finally paused, one foot on the porch steps. "So...you would watch a video...of somebody petting a camera...and it would help you relax."

"Well, when you say it like that..."

"That I have to see. Or better yet," and her fist connected with his shoulder, "I'll come up to your room tonight and give you the scalp-scratching of your life, you big kitty, just to see you shiver like you did back at the fence post!" The grin on her face was downright wicked, as though she was relishing the thought of having Hiccup at her mercy.

_So now I can look forward to that all day._ A smile tugged at his mouth, thinking of her hands on his head._ Great._

Hiccup took the porch steps slower than Astrid had, but even though his speed was much lower his step felt much lighter.


	7. Returning At Last

_**Author's note:** Sorry this is late. First this chapter didn't come as easily to me (what I have for the rest of this fic is vague at best), and then there was a period of time when I couldn't work on it because of some weird Internet troubles, and_ then_ when I got it all typed up FanFiction logged me out before I could save so I had to write it all over again_..._what are you gonna do, right?_

_It has been mentioned that Hiccup was rather...forward with Astrid. This was not by design, but I came up with an explanation. In this storyverse, Valka and her gentler ideals have always been a part of Hiccup's life, so he would have a role model to look up to. He's not _accepted_ as one of the hands, exactly, but he's not quite the Chief's embarrassment that he was in the first movie. Remember how...I think that was in chapter 5 when that came up...Hiccup took it as a given that Astrid would never seriously hurt him because if she did Stoik would fire her? I really don't think Hiccup had _that_ in the movie, because he never thought his father would offer any support to his fishbone of a son (and he was probably right). Having the mother gives him a confidence boost___. Basically, before Toothless, he wasn't at rock bottom, so he's just a little bit bolder even around his crush than if he had been_._

_Thus endeth the discussion. Onward to the story!_

* * *

With a tool that looked like something between a can opener and a little scythe, Hiccup carefully worked around the base of the cone he wanted off. Toothless held rock-still, understanding from Hiccup's mind that if he flinched the tool might slip and crack the horn that his rider was trying to leave - and while that wouldn't interfere with his power levels, it would hamper his precision and leave a weak point in his horn's integrity: one hard blow at exactly the wrong angle would split the whole horn down the middle. The way the tool was working now, if a cone was cracked in the trimming it would be the one coming off.

Heavy footsteps sounded in the doorway, approaching and then stopping out of range of a panicked unicorn's kicks.

Hiccup knew those steps. "Hey, Dad," he said without looking up.

"He's behaving for you?"

"Yeah...I don't think he quite understands why I want the horn, but he gets that I want a little and he's willing to give the little I want."

"I managed to make contact with some people in the business of improving hospital equipment; they'll test your buddy's horn and see if it does anything you think it can do. If it works, the royalties will go a long way towards paying off both your medical bills."

Hiccup carefully took the end of the horn and wiggled it; it seemed a bit loose. He put the blade down and focused on gently rocking the last few cones. "I just hope it doesn't set off another chain of unicorn hunts."

"Seems unlikely; hardly anyone ever even sees a Black. And that song scares people off them quickly enough." Stoik looked thoughtfully at Toothless. "Do you think it makes a difference, whether the unicorn wants to give up a bit of horn or not or doesn't care either way?"

Hiccup's brows drew down. "What, you mean like in the stories where a magical creature freely gives someone a bit of blood or something and it has all these positive extra qualities..." the loosened horn came free with a hard pop, "Good boy, Toothless...and if someone killed a magical creature to steal the same blood it has a curse on it?" He ran his thumb over the new end of the horn, checking for cracks; it seemed sound. What he'd pulled off had a slight crack in it, but that wasn't really a problem: unicorn horn was almost never used in its base form, instead being carved into something or ground up.

"Exactly."

"I don't know. Do you?" Hiccup tossed the horn piece to his father, who caught it deftly.

"Not at all about the death-curse; I was working these creatures right at the end of the 'hunting unicorns for their artifacts' period, and any hunter worth his salt could drop one straight dead within a second of getting it in his crosshairs. Heck, I was one of them. And that's not a lot of time for a dying-curse, especially when you're focusing on running or fighting for your life a moment before." Stoik rubbed his beard. "Now, I suppose if what was done was that a unicorn was held down and its horn sawed off...something more torturous..._maybe that_ would be cursed. I don't personally know anyone who ever did that, though, and I have never heard of any situation where something bad happened to someone because they used horn from one."

Hiccup shuddered, running his fingers through Toothless's mane for reassurance. He found it hard to understand why anyone would want to torture a unicorn just for their horns and hair: they weren't exactly the paragons of purity old legends made them out to be, but they were still beautiful and graceful_ and _beneficial to their home environments. He hoped anyone who _had_ tortured one really had gotten cursed artifacts for their troubles.

Now, he had known already that his dad used to hunt unicorns: it had been said (mostly by old Melvin) that Stoik had been the best such hunter out there. But at least he'd also known that Stoik didn't torture them, and had been one of the first to try another way. Harvesting from domestic and mostly-domestic unicorns was easier, especially when it was discovered that the horns were cut-and-come-again.

"As for the other...well, if I were to admit that a unicorn had the intelligence to curse things taken that they hadn't wanted to give, I would have to admit that they'd be smart enough to add a little boost to something they were giving freely. But I think, on the whole, I'd be more inclined to say no. If they were that smart, they'd have either mounted an attack on us unicorn hunters or collectively fled to parts unknown before they'd lost more than a few of their own."

Hiccup giggled. Let it never be said that Stoik Haddock wasn't capable of using decent logic.

"Your mother, now...she's always been convinced of the opposite. It's one reason, I'm sure, that she learned the art of unicorn-whispering - so that she could ask nicely if she could trim their horns or comb hairs from their manes." Stoik started to turn away, and then looked back. "Speaking of which, in her last message she said that the road was clear enough to traverse; she'll be home within three days, I shouldn't wonder."

"She's coming home?" Excited, Hiccup jumped to his feet so fast that he stumbled on his prosthetic and had to be caught by Toothless's neck. "Does she, um, know about Toothless?"

"I've kept her...mostly up to date about the happenings on the ranch, yes."

"Mostly?"

Stoik looked down at Hiccup's leg. "There are some things you have to brave in person. I just hope I don't end up in the recliner again."

"Again?" A mischievous grin lit Hiccup's face. "Would that, by any chance, be why you have a recliner that turns into a bed?"

Toothless turned his head to look at Stoik, as though curious to hear this piece of information himself.

Stoik half-glared at his son. "Yes, darn you; at some point when we were first married, when the only furniture in the house was still the bed, the kitchen table and chairs, and the recliner - a different recliner, an old one - we got into a fight over something or other. I was in the wrong but didn't want to admit it, and she banished me from the master bedroom. By the next morning I was in so much pain that I manned up and apologized, and when I got my first big paycheck I traded that recliner for the one we have now. Just in case I ever wound up in that much trouble again."

A sound very like a human chuckle came from Toothless's throat, and he tossed his head playfully.

Hiccup swallowed down his own chuckles and managed to say, "I think you'll be fine; it was Scott's fault we both wound up broken, not yours." He couldn't quite keep the grin off of his face, though, imagining his slender mother bullying his massive father out of any room. It wasn't easy, but it wasn't hard either: Valka was the only person to ever walk in the front door who could successfully intimidate Stoik, daring him with a look to argue with her. He only did if he was sure of his own footing, which was usually when the conversation had to do with running the ranch, and even then he never got her to _back down_ \- she came around instead, and still got something or other that she wanted out of it.

Stoik might rule the ranch, but _Valka_ ruled the roost.

* * *

Hiccup went for a ride late that afternoon. "I think you're going to like my mother, Toothless. Unicorns are just like people to her; she talks to them, and they talk back. I don't know if she has a telepathic link with any of them, like what we share, but if she _doesn't_ then her ability to tell when one has taken a dislike to someone or something...it's a little bit uncanny."

Toothless wanted to know why Valka wasn't there. If she had been, she could have told Spencer that he'd better let the Black he captured be either turned loose or trained by someone else.

"Don't like my uncle, do you? Neither do I, really - he lets Scott get away with too much. Well, Mom has this little job of her own: unicorn rescue. She and a few other people keep tabs on unicorn owners, and they send messages to each other if they think one of them is mistreating their beast. You're lucky you wound up here and not owned by, say, Alvin. He's red-flagged in my mother's book. So's the Berserker Ranch; it was off her radar for a while, and then Dagur took over and it went back on...anyway. I've seen some of the poor animals out of stables like those - horns cracked or even sawed off, mouths damaged by steel bits, ribs showing from underfeeding...and that's not even including the troubles exclusive to certain breeds. It's horrible." It was horrible even imagining, that someone would whip a Lowlander bloody because it couldn't run any faster, or force a Highlander to founder trying to pull a load that was too heavy, or keep an Inlander in a humid, leaky stable until its coat was rotting right off its skin.

Toothless bobbed his head violently, nearly yanking the reins out of Hiccup's hands, making it very clear that he agreed with that assessment.

"I _think_ my mom's the only one of her operation to regularly skirt the law - if she can't get a mistreated unicorn out of its owner's hands legally, she'll steal it. That usually happens if its particular abuse is drugs, because short of a blood test there's no way to know in the early stages if one's being doped. My mom went on another rescue mission a couple months back; for my dad's sake, I hope it was a legal one - he's very careful to ask her as few questions as possible about her work."

Toothless would like her, all right.


	8. Finally Friends

_**Author's note:** If you're just now tuning in to this fanfic, ignore the rest of the note and go straight to the chapter. If you've been following from Day 1, you might want to reread chapters 4-7 again - I've revised them some.  
_

* * *

"Mom's coming home."

"I heard."

Astrid had followed through on her threat to visit Hiccup and trigger his ASMR. She was sitting on his bed next to his pillow, running her fingers through his hair and tracing his scalp with her nails. She wasn't in her bedclothes yet, but she had taken off most of her studded accessories before coming anywhere near Hiccup's bed.

Which had been moved back upstairs. As far as either of them knew, no one actually knew she was there.

"You must be pretty excited. I'd be, if it was my mom."

Hiccup moaned softly as a shiver ran through his body, temporarily distracted from her words by what her hands were doing. Then he refocused. "Well...yeah, it's kind of hard not to be. She's...amazing. You watch her, and you see where I get _my_ dramatic flair."

Astrid's hands paused. "I'm sensing a 'but' here."

"She knows about Toothless being here...Dad told her that much, and presumably that I'm the only one able to ride him...but he didn't tell her about either of us being injured." Then he yelped as Astrid took a couple fistfuls of hair close to his scalp and gave his head a gentle shake.

"Did she ever suggest to you that she would love you less if you weren't whole?"

Hiccup chuckled a bit and lifted his shoulders. "Actually...it's _when_ I'm hurt or sick that she really proves that she loves me. She fusses over me like there's no tomorrow, making sure I'm not bored, giving me sweets to help the nasty medicine go down, petting my hair at night..."

Astrid smirked and moved a hand to his forehead briefly, as if checking for a fever. "Almost sounds like a reason to jump under a truck, to get all the pampering."

"Well," Hiccup sobered, "Except that...it always hurts her to see me suffering. Which is probably why Dad hasn't told her about the leg, actually, she'd be suffering on my behalf without any way to do anything about it."

"_That_ sounds like motherly love to me." Fingers traced the mark on his forehead. "I know that when mothers say they'll love their children forever they don't expect their dear babies to totter through the door on crutches with half a leg gone...I think your dad's on the wrong track, not telling her. Real motherly love doesn't care how many limbs you have, but she needs time to get adjusted to the idea before seeing you shocks the living daylights out of her."

Another shiver went the length of Hiccup's body. "Well...Dad says there's some news that should just be given in person, and he is right. He never gives her bad news over the phone or in an email, and I think he's all the braver for that. But you're right too, a missing foot is something that requires some advance warning. If she sees him first, there's no problem, but what if she sees me and Toothless first? That really will land Dad back in the recliner."

"Do you have your mother's email address?"

"There's a thought...yes I do. And I usually email her a couple times a week when she's out on a call; she's probably missing me after a month of silence, although just as probably she knows that I'm fine from my dad's messages. _I_ could warn her. It's not bad news for me - my memory of the worst of it is kind of hazy anyway." All the hazier while Astrid was doing _that_, but... "I'll email her first thing in the morning."

"Smart boy." Astrid's hand drifted lazily across his closed eyelids. Then the bed rocked as she stood up. "You good?"

"Yeah..." Hiccup snuggled deeper under the blankets. "G'night, Astrid."

Astrid paused. Then she knelt over him, close enough that her breath whispered over his skin as she replied, "Goodnight, Hiccup."

Then, to Hiccup's surprise, she kissed his forehead before she left the room.

_Wow..._

Part of him wished that had been on the lips. But he wasn't interested just now in pushing his luck by calling her back for a do-over.

* * *

From: Hiccup (Harold)

To: Mom (Valka)

Subject: Catching Up

_I expect Dad told you about Toothless the Black Unicorn but I rather doubt he told you that I was held in thrall for a month because then he would have had to tell you why. I understand his reasoning, but he has no way (short of locking Toothless in a stall and me in my room) of _guaranteeing_ that you'll see him before you see us, and you deserve better._

_See, there was a little situation with the Black before he was named Toothless: after all of my uncle's failed training attempts had nearly ruined the poor unicorn, Scott threw me onto his back. He panicked and kicked his way through the fence, and took off through the Woods That Howled with me stuck on one of his wings. Then we had an accident (which I don't remember, by the way) and just about destroyed his left wing and my left foot. I still don't know why he didn't just leave me there instead of hypnotizing me away from the pain and helping me back home, but here we are. He only listens to me now (I'm sure Dad did tell you about that) and I designed a prosthetic wing to replace the broken one that had to be removed. I'm on a prosthetic too, now - still getting the feel of it, but it doesn't hurt any and at least I'm walking unaided._

_I can't wait to see you and hear about all the things Dad's not supposed to know. ;)_

_H.H.H. III_

* * *

Hiccup took Toothless out for a ride before breakfast. Although he didn't bring any rope, he thought over what riders were supposed to do on the range so that the unicorn could see what sort of behavior he had to tolerate; by the time they returned to the stables, Toothless knew all the work that a hand and his mount was supposed to do together before breakfast.

"Gee, Hoofking looks lonely," Hiccup commented as he filled Toothless's bin. "I know Scott's not allowed to ride him right now, but surely he's allowed to come visit..."

Toothless stared intently at Hoofking and snorted. Hoofking stared back for a moment, and then snorted in his own turn and gave his head a haughty shake, raising his horn towards the ceiling as he slowly turned around in a stall barely big enough to allow the movement.

Hiccup cocked a wry eyebrow. "What was that about?"

Toothless made his odd human chuckle and bumped Hiccup's shoulder, setting off sparks in the boy's head. It seemed he'd pointed out that Hoofking's rider was an idiot, to which the answer was something in the vein of "_Well, of course he is, but he's _my _idiot_."

"Unicorns; no understanding them," Hiccup laughed. When Toothless bumped his shoulder again he added, "And yes, that includes you. I still don't know why you stuck around after I fell off you a month ago."

_Two hearts, beating as one._

"Well, but you didn't know that before you hypnotized me, did you?"

Toothless considered Hiccup for a moment. Then he stuck his face in the bin, dismissing his rider in favor of breakfast. It seemed that their mutual vocabulary didn't cover the unicorn's logic adequately enough to convey it to a human.

"Ah, never mind. I'd better get my breakfast."

* * *

Astrid greeted Hiccup at the door. "Hey, you survived the morning ride!"

"Was that ever in doubt?" Hiccup stumbled on the last stair and was caught by Astrid's firm hand.

"Got me. There's talk around the coffee pot of you being a poster boy for Berk Ranch."

"Agh, no! Spare me from that!" His father's picture had been on monthly fliers for years; every few months he would pick a unicorn and pose for a new one so that they would always be up to date. Hiccup had no intention of being Berk Ranch's new "face," at least not for many years yet.

Astrid made a wry face at Hiccup's reaction. "It's not that bad. I've been in a couple of shots for the ranch, and they look pretty good."

"I know." Hiccup hesitated. "You've been...in my room."

"Yes, I saw that you covered your walls with a couple dozen copies of every shot to ever have me in them." She winked saucily at him. "Lucky you, that they all have so many unicorns; you _could_ just be studying your dad's monthly roundups."

"You're more photogenic than I am." Then he had to flinch away as Astrid's fist connected.

"Flatterer."

"Does anyone know that you were..." once again his words faltered, unsure how to continue.

"I'm not asking. So far, no one's said anything." Her gaze cut sideways. "Do you care?"

"I...don't...know." Hiccup took a deep breath. "I don't want you killing me if _you_ don't want to be...acknowledged as a, a..." They were young for any heavy relationship.

"...Friend?"

Hiccup shrugged. Then he found himself pulled to a stop as Astrid's hand closed on his shoulder.

"I don't really have any objections to us being friends, Hiccup. You're smarter than Scott and both twins, all put together, and your sense of humor is better than theirs. I'm..." Astrid thought her words over and started again. "It would be an honor to ride with you."

Hiccup blinked, surprised. Then he smiled.

"Thanks."


	9. Shoot And Run

**_Author's Note:_**_ my Time comes on a day when I have no choice but to go for a run,_ and_ I__ got very little sleep last night. It must be Friday the 13th. On a more cheerful note, I have plans for a Valentine's-Day special chapter tomorrow!  
_

* * *

Fortunately, Stoik had no intention of turning Hiccup into Berk Ranch's poster boy today.

He did, however, insist that his next batch of pictures be of himself on Toothless.

"That will be an impressive touch: the master of the ranch, on the back of the fabled Black Unicorn!" And he would hear no arguments to the contrary.

Hiccup spent the rest of the morning grooming Toothless and explaining to him - or trying to - what was going on and _why_ he had to stand still with this not-Hiccup human on his back. Their mutual vocabulary didn't seem to include the concept of capturing an image for others to see later, which made everything take much longer.

By the time his coat and keratin were as smooth and shiny as brushing could make them, Toothless finally seemed to grasp that it was just a weird human thing and Hiccup would be very happy if they both came out of that photo shoot uninjured. He followed Hiccup outside and walked up to Stoik with a human sigh of longsuffering.

"I still don't know that this is a good idea," Hiccup sighed to Gobber.

"Will he even let anyone else up there?" Gobber asked - not really addressing Hiccup, but the general air above the unicorn.

He would - but he wouldn't stand completely still. He shifted restlessly, objecting mildly to the heavy nudges at his sides and the way Stoik tried to coax his head and neck to a certain angle with the reins. Two pictures were rejected because he suddenly - _reared up_ was too strong a description, but his front hooves definitely left the ground at the instant the shutter clicked and the photo was hopelessly blurry. Another three were ruined because Toothless turned his head far enough to glare one-eyed at Stoik; twice his horn was caught at some odd angle, and the third time it was of the back of his head. Once he danced in a half-circle right as the button was pushed, and the camera caught a view that was more front than right-profile. For a lot of very good reasons, Stoik wanted to delay as long as possible word getting out that his Black Unicorn was crippled, which meant that any published pictures of Toothless had to hide the prosthetic.

"One more for luck and then I think you'd better call it a day, Stoik," Gobber finally called. "The Black won't take much more of this."

Stoik sighed in frustration. "All right...last one."

"Oh, and here's another suggestion for you..." Gobber suddenly shouldered Hiccup despite his objections and walked around until the boy was right where Toothless was supposed to be looking. "Hey, Toothless, look what I've got!"

At the sound of his name Toothless turned his head - and stared with a snort of surprise.

_Click._ "I think that's as good as we're going to get it, sir!" Bucket called up, waving the camera.

Stoik dismounted - so fast and with such a lack of dignity that Hiccup seriously wondered if Toothless had shied out from under him when he felt the movement. At least the big man hadn't wound up on his face in the dirt.

"Not one of my better ideas," Stoik admitted in an undertone as Bucket walked off to download the picture. "He's so tame with you, Hiccup...I suppose I'm lucky that he was behaving _half_-trained for me instead of _un_trained."

Hiccup shrugged sheepishly as Gobber put him back down. "Ruth and Tully...are insane, but they might have been on to something yesterday. That line in the song is 'there is but one who rides my back.' If the fire-horned unicorns really do only really tame down for one person..."

"And for Toothless here, that would be you." Stoik hefted Hiccup easily into the saddle. "Well, I'll think about actually using that picture. You two go have a bit of a run; loosen him up, after," a wry smirk, "Standing still for twenty minutes. Take the rest of the day off - you can get back to serious work on the ranch tomorrow."

Hiccup grinned, nodded, and kicked his prosthetic into the stirrup his dad had ignored for the shoot. Leaning over Toothless's neck, he whispered, "Let's get out of here before he changes his mind!"

With a flash of silver hooves they were out of sight.

* * *

They ran all around the range, vaulting fences and racing unsaddled unicorns, for the next couple of hours. Then they rushed into the Woods That Howled and added their own racket to the sounds already echoing in the dark - Hiccup yodeled like a mad Indian or a drunken cowboy, and Toothless tossed his head in time and brayed along gleefully. They risked their limbs among the trees for no reason other than the adrenalin rush.

"WOOO!" Hiccup screamed as they nearly flew back out of the trees.

Toothless screamed in turn, leaping clear of the ground and gliding nearly double his length before returning to mere running again - at a slightly slower pace.

"You know," Hiccup added when he got his breath back, "We should make it a tradition to ditch the ranch every few weeks for a run like that. Really remember what it feels like to be completely free." Oh, his dad would probably take it out of their monthly holidays, but his _mom_ definitely wouldn't grudge them the run; she took long rides every couple of months herself, ostensibly to see how the wild herds were doing but also just to experience the Wilderwest.

Toothless agreed with the sentiment. Running through densely wooded areas at breakneck speeds was his favorite pastime - had been since he was old enough to control his legs and wings properly. He was glad his rider had enjoyed it as well, since they could only do it together now.

"How old are you, anyway?" Hiccup figured at least five, since that was when unicorns attained their peak of development.

He wasn't sure. There was little difference between day and night in the Woods That Howled, and even the weather didn't change much beneath the dense canopy. But yes, at least five springs.

...

What was that noise?

"What noise?" Hiccup jerked back to attention - a little surprised at himself and the sheer amount of trust he had in the unicorn beneath him. If he'd been paying any less attention, he'd be asleep. _ In a Black's saddle, no less!_ "I don't hear anything but our own..."

If he could have described the sensation, it would have been like someone had taken a firm hold of his ears on either side and pulled. Not painful, but a bit disorienting...and suddenly a lot more sound was coming in. Their own hoofbeats and the squeak of the tack, yes, and the air that they were displacing by moving and breathing...but something else was displacing air as well, coming their way from the north.

_Two creatures. No, three. Two unicorns, one rider._

_One_ rider? Was he riding a mother and being followed by the baby? _Not unless the "baby" is a five-year-old and still trailing mama._ Didn't happen.

Hiccup tried with all his might to channel what he was hearing through everything he ever knew about unicorns and riders, looking for a match. He swayed slightly in the saddle, trusting even further in Toothless to not let him crash to the ground while in this half-trance.

_I...don't...think they're even the same breed of 'corn._ The follower was a Highlander - not flying, but running, and pulverizing rock into soil with every pounding hoof. The leader...wasn't a breed he was familiar with at all. The sound of its hooves was _like_ what Toothless was making, with the crackle of fire, but different. Thicker. Headier.

_Blacks are from the Woods That Howled, northeast of Berk Ranch. What lives to the straight north?_

_Frigids._

Hiccup had never encountered a Frigid Unicorn in person; there was no one on Berk Ranch with the time to catch and train one, especially seeing that they could only be trained via unicorn-whispering. They didn't usually venture farther south on their own, either.

They were close enough to see now...his eyes burned as his vision overlapped with Toothless's...

_Wait a sec...the tack's on the Highlander, but the rider's on the Frigid!_ Who in their right mind rode bareback on a _Frigid_ when there was a saddled unicorn of any other breed right there?

Hiccup's head was starting to throb rather painfully, trying to balance what Toothless was observing with what _he_ was remembering in some way that actually made sense. He clutched at the saddle with one hand, pressing hard on his forehead with the other hand. _T-t-Toothless, let go...I can't...keep this up any longer..._

Toothless must have either understood what Hiccup was thinking, or noticed his rider's distress: as he swiveled to run back towards the ranch, he released the boy's mind.

With a strangled gasp of relief Hiccup found himself fully back in his body. He looked around - and nearly had a heart attack when he saw that the Frigid had come right up alongside him, its rider looking him and Toothless carefully over. Prosthetics and all.

At least it looked like he had winter gear on; that made his decision to ride bareback on a Frigid Unicorn...at least make slightly more sense. Of course, Hiccup couldn't see his face at all under what looked like a ski mask. He turned his head farther to look at the Highlander following them.

Red. Lighter in the coat, darker in the horn and hoof, but still a lot of intense red. The relative darkness of its horn and hooves were made all the clearer by white "socks" and a thin white blaze on its face...wait. That wasn't a blaze - that was a scar, winding from somewhere by its right ear down to just nick its right nostril. It skated so close to the horn that the unicorn looked like someone had tried to kill it and take its horn in one sweep of an axe.

Hiccup recognized that scar. He knew that unicorn - and knowing who the_ unicorn_ was, he instantly knew who had to be sitting on that Frigid.

Not he.

She.

_You weren't kidding when you said _within_ three days, were you? I can't wait to hear the story behind this one!_


	10. Her Valentine

**_Author's Note:_**_ Since Raberba girl has requested (well, sort of requested) a chapter or oneshot of Astrid's pre-Toothless opinions of Hiccup, and since any such side-story would undoubtedly include a little romantic thought, for a Valentine's Day Special I'm temporarily deviating from the main plot to chase down that side plot. Don't worry, next chapter will be back in the action!  
_

* * *

Every unicorn breed had its own preference for where and how they boarded in a barn; most ranches just put them in an ordinary barn like what horses or cattle used, but Berk Ranch had recently added a specialized barn that allowed stalls to be customized according to those preferences. It was just barely tall enough plus the foundation that two unicorns could be stabled one on top of the other, and ceiling and floor slats were moved around to put a stall higher or lower according to the beast's desires. Lowland Unicorns very much preferred having their hooves on solid ground and never mind if water might seep in for being belowdecks; all their stalls were solidly at the bottom. Highland Unicorns appeared to have a phobia of anything being above their heads, and didn't care at all if the roof leaked; all their stalls were directly under the eaves. Inland Unicorns didn't want to get the least bit wet, so they were set at a halfway level between the Highlanders and Lowlanders and had plenty of protection from all the hazards of rain.

Astrid had her own room, in the space below Stormfly's stall; one of the side benefits of being the only teenage female to work as a ranch hand. Since Stormfly was a Highlander, the basement beneath her stall was easily roomy enough for one human of relatively spartan tastes to live alone. Nothing got by Stormfly, either, so Astrid could always walk into her domain with no fear of being taken by surprise.

Except by her cat.

"Sneaky! One of these days I really _am_ going to step on you," Astrid scolded as she caught herself on the doorway, having jerked her weight back just in time to keep her left foot from coming down hard on the gray cat that seemed determined to rest on the throw rug.

Sneaky wasn't concerned with Astrid's warning; he always started to move when _he_ felt her foot above him, and he moved faster than her foot's ability to squash him. After nearly tripping her, he was now sitting on her bed grooming where she'd touched him.

Astrid sat down next to him. "How have you been while I was on vacation, anyway? Did Mulder put out food for you, or were you catching mice for two weeks? Did you play with Iggy and Pain?" Iggy was Fisk's, an orange tabby with a calm and friendly nature and a surprising interest in fetch; Pain was a black-and-white tuxedo that was Scott's in the sense that it attacked him and ignored everyone else. All three cats were part of a litter of six, donated to the ranch by dear old Gothi; seemed she finally had too many cats to keep another full litter. Astrid hoped she'd spayed and neutered most, if not all, of the cats she still had now.

The twins got nearly-identical yellowish things, and brought them home from the range; Astrid couldn't remember their names, but probably they both got something to do with hairballs.

Hiccup got one, too...he'd chosen last, the little dirt-brown that no one else wanted.

Scott was always too hard on Hiccup. He never quite dared to do more than shove the boy around, knock him off of fences, and toss him up onto half-tamed unicorns to scare him - this last time was a first, throwing Hiccup onto a unicorn that wasn't really tamed at all - but he made it very clear that he considered his cousin far below a friend. He'd reached into the box first, blocking everyone else off.

Fisk and the twins had kind of cut Hiccup off from the box, too; none of them had actually meant to, but Fisk was large, and it was dangerous to try and push past Ruth and Tully with the way they shoved at each other. Astrid hadn't - she'd come from the other side of the box altogether - but couldn't she have waited until Hiccup could stand up and look?

Couldn't Fisk have?

_You snooze, you lose._ That had always been her mantra, even when she felt sorry for Hiccup. Now she was wondering. He had a way of coming from behind with a "loser's choice," but that didn't mean he always had to have the last pick. If he could make those comebacks when handicapped by what he got, just imagine what he could do with first pick. Astrid wondered which one he would have picked if he could have gotten to the box first.

Wait, she and Hiccup __had_ _discussed the cats before; one of those days before Toothless put him back in his head.

_"Everybody got the cats they deserved that day. We all knew that the twins would go for those matching yellow hairballs the minute we saw there were two so nearly identical. Nobody would have fought for them, it was too perfect. And the tuxedo kitty chose Scott, not the other way around; karma's great, isn't it?" He giggled. "And Fisk and I got the only two trainable cats in that entire box."_

_"Cats can be trained?"_

_He laughed aloud at that, and nodded vigorously. "Patience and treats, Astrid; lots and lots of patience, and treats."_

Great, now she was thinking about how nice his laugh was when he wasn't trying to force it.

"Maybe I'm just going crazy." Astrid started to stand up - and claws dug into her shoulders as Sneaky protested the sudden movement. He'd draped himself over her neck while she was thinking, and she never even noticed. That was about as common behavior for him as the sprawling on the floor right where she would step, and those hobbies among other things had earned him his name.

She _did_ deserve Sneaky. He was constantly doing _something_ to keep her off-balance in her own domain, disrupting her thought process, making it harder to maintain a competitive focus. In his bizarre feline brain, humans were supposed to relax and let him slide all over them like so much silk.

"Come on, get off..." Astrid tried to pry Sneaky off. He just wrapped himself all the more firmly around her neck, rubbing his head directly under her chin and purring against her throat. It felt weird, like she was the one purring...

_Eep_ -

Goosebumps raced up the back of her neck and made her scalp prickle. She froze, eyes widening, completely ignoring the fact that Sneaky was kneading her collarbone with his front paws.

_Oh. My. Gods._

_Hiccup, I am so sorry I mocked you._

_Her_ ASMR, evidently, was triggered by sounds that could be _felt_. Come to think of it, now that she had a name for it and connected it to the sensation, she'd experienced it before. Wind across a microphone.

Hiccup wasn't kidding, the tingles were amazing.

She wondered if he ever triggered them for himself. Without the videos (and that part still didn't make sense, how watching someone pretending to touch your hair would have the same effect as someone touching your hair). Sure, his own hands would probably be about as effective as trying to tickle yourself, but if he could train his cat...

_Sharps, that was his name. And yes, he _had_ been trained to scalp massage._ That had come up in the discussion about cats; Astrid hadn't understood what Hiccup was talking about at all, because evidently trying to talk about your ASMR while a unicorn is holding your brain hostage just triggers it and gets you sidetracked, but he'd got as far as Sharps climbing onto his head. _Someday I want to see that._

Why did she always think of Hiccup when she thought of the cats? Fisk had been the one to go and pick them up from Gothi.

"Demented cats, all of you," Astrid informed Sneaky. Then she picked up a water bottle and poured some into his dish.

That did what all her earlier tugging didn't do. Sneaky jumped down and started lapping.

Maybe it was because Hiccup was always the one to offer help with the cat problems. Used to be, when the cats were brand new and not just part of their routines, Hiccup and Fisk would discuss modifications to their kitties' diets and ways to teach them where they could and could not play. Seemed like it was always Hiccup to offer tentative suggestions to the others about how to keep their cats out of trouble (ignored altogether by Scott; who knew about the twins?). Astrid couldn't remember any specific instance where Hiccup had given her advice, and certainly couldn't remember if she'd ever taken it, but there was one time...

Sneaky had figured out how to open the cupboard where she stored her pads. Or maybe she hadn't closed it quite tight. Either way, when she opened the door and saw the shredded mess he was nesting in, she'd freaked out. Her menstrual calendar hadn't stabilized yet; she didn't know when her next period was coming, not really. And she couldn't simply up and leave - she was due to assist on a roundup, and _Buckingham_ was her superior. How could she explain to the man better known as Bucket that she had to buy pads? He might not be embarrassed (nothing much seemed to embarrass him), but she would be.

Scott tried to flirt that day, too. Usually, she would have beaten him into the ground, but when he included the words, "If there is anything at all I can do for my lady..." she saw an opportunity to get rid of him. She couldn't give up the roundup, but she could ask him to buy her pads: if he did it, she would be restocked, if he didn't he would avoid her for the rest of the day, and either way he would be too embarrassed to talk to her for weeks. Win-win. Sure enough, the instant he understood what she was asking him to pick up from the store, he turned several spectacular colors not within his normal tone and took off towards the Big House.

That had been expected; what had _not_ been expected was for Harold to be within earshot, and of the opinion that Astrid's problem was more important than his own embarrassment at helping her. He had come up, stammered out that he would be happy to buy some pads (somehow she doubted the adjective, given how red his face was, but he was volunteering), and then asked some basic questions about what _exactly_ she wanted and where to find it. After the roundup he caught up to her again, still the color of tomato sauce, and gave her the bag of pads; he'd splurged and got her a big bag, too, when she had vaguely said that it didn't matter. That was probably when her opinion of Hiccup climbed in the general direction of the roof: a small bag would have been easier to hide, and maybe easier to blow off as a "favor" to whoever was running the cash register. Somehow, the fact that he was brave enough to walk out of that store with a gigantic bag of what was essentially ladies' underwear liners...made him far more of a man than his bigger and burlier cousin who had run in panic at the thought of buying even a small package.

_I should have known then that he loved me. How did it take until he lost a leg for me to realize that?_

_And how did it take _this _long for me to realize that I love him?_

How on earth would she ever be able to look him in the face and admit that? She didn't talk about her feelings. Ever.

_I suppose I could just walk up to him without preamble and kiss him on the lips. That would go over well._ A slow smile spread on Astrid's face, imagining Hiccup's expression if she ever did that. _Yeah...that would go over _really_ well._


	11. The Questions

_**Author's Note: **Sorry this chapter took so long. My only defense is, life happened - I've been rather busy._

* * *

Stoik knew something was up the minute he saw the three unicorns tearing towards the ranch, nearly side-by-side. Hiccup was nearly standing up in Toothless's saddle and waving like there was no tomorrow, shouting words that were unintelligible over the pounding, blazing hooves. The Frigid's rider made no attempt to communicate, focusing on staying in relative control.

When the Highlander got close enough for him to pick out details, he recognized it instantly: it was Cloudjumper, Valka's personal mount - and the beast to teach a five-year-old Hiccup that unicorns had lion-tails with the lashing power of a fine whip when startled. Ten years later, he still had the scar on his chin as a reminder not to run up behind one of these horned creatures. Cloudjumper had gone with Valka on her latest call; they never got farther apart than half the range.

If her unicorn was here...

"Dad, you're not going to believe this," Hiccup began as all three unicorns stopped nearly on the porch.

Stoik scarcely listened. He was watching the Frigid's rider as she dismounted and pulled off her mask. It _was_ Valka, shrugging partway out of her coat and letting it fall behind her as she rushed into his arms. Her lips were cold as they pressed to his, starved for his warmth after a long, cold ride.

"We need to talk, Stoik," she warned him when she came up for air. Whatever it was clearly wasn't urgent, however, as she went right back to kissing him.

"Um, yeah, you guys do that," Hiccup said awkwardly behind her, aiming Toothless's head back towards the stables. "I'm going to go, uh, unsaddle this guy...and then if anyone needs me I'll be upstairs letting Sharps walk on my head, or something..."

Both ignored him as Toothless trotted off, looking back briefly in something like confusion as the two other unicorns fell into step behind him.

* * *

The feline scalp massage had to wait, unfortunately: after a month of just his scratching post, Sharps's claws were too sharp and likely would draw blood. Fortunately one of the first things Hiccup had successfully taught him was to sit still as all his claws were filed.

"Mom's home," he told Sharps as he held the cat in his lap and gently worked at each claw-tip. "And she brought back a Frigid Unicorn with a yellowish horn. I wonder how she came by him; he doesn't look like someone was trying to break him."

Sharps yawned, as though expressing an opinion of how successful "breaking" a Frigid would be.

"Yeah, I know. I wonder what she wants to talk to my dad about. Probably his trying to hide my prosthetic."

Sharps sneezed.

"He meant well, though. She's got to give him credit for that."

A very soft knock at his doorway got his attention. "You talk to your cat, too?"

"Nobody else around to talk to, usually," Hiccup replied, turning to look at Astrid. "I think that's the most discreet entrance you've ever made."

Astrid smirked wryly. "A startle would be hard on your little friend; wouldn't want you to accidentally hurt him."

_Oh, of course, be gentle for the cat's benefit._ Hiccup let it slide, though: he was benefiting from that consideration. "My mom's home."

"I think everybody on the ranch knows that by now. The troublemakers better take cover."

Hiccup grinned. "What, you think my dad's not scary enough?"

Astrid sat down next to him and gently scratched Sharps's head. "If he was, Scott and the twins wouldn't dare try half the things they do." She smiled back, though, sharing in the joke. "What's with the Frigid? Any ideas?"

"Nope. He doesn't look like the unicorns she usually brings home from jobs."

"Clearly."

"No, I mean she usually brings home unicorns that have been so badly abused that she wants to take a personal hand in restoring their health. This Frigid looked completely fine on the way back."

"Oh." Astrid stared intently at his forehead. "Do you have a headache?"

Hiccup blinked at the right turn. "Why?"

"Your forehead's all scrunched up."

"Oh...yeah, a bit. Toothless..." Hiccup paused, his hands momentarily stopping with the file, as he tried to think of a way to explain what had happened. "Um, I was trying to do a bit too much inside my head. Does that make any sense at all?"

Astrid stared into space. Then, slowly, she nodded. "Knowing you, I guess it does."

Sharps tried to pull his paw away. Thus reminded that he wasn't done, Hiccup went back to work.

"Can _he_ trigger it for you?"

"He. Toothless?" At Astrid's nod he shrugged. "If he _can_ give me tingles, he hasn't yet." Of all the things he remembered about his time under Toothless's spell, that wasn't one of them.

Astrid put her hand on Hiccup's head, lightly stirring his hair with her nails. The headache eased gradually away at her touch, and by the time Hiccup was done with Sharps's claws he no longer needed the cat to climb on him.

"Good boy, Sharps." He gave the little brown a good chin-scratch and let him run away. Then he glanced at Astrid, who still had her hand on his head. "Well?"

Astrid considered him for a long moment, a speculative expression on her face. Then she gave his head a sharp turn to the side and kissed his cheek, and jumped up to sprint from the room before he could react at all.

She needn't have hurried. It was several minutes before Hiccup could react.

_What was _that_ for?_

By then, of course, she was long gone. He would have to intercept her later and ask.

* * *

Stoik was in trouble, it seemed. However, nobody seemed to think it was serious, so perhaps Valka _was_ giving him some credit for wanting to give "bad news" in person.

Hiccup decided not to ask what his dad's punishment was. It wasn't his business. As a result, the first thing he said to his mom was, "So, about the call..."

Valka chuckled. "Actually, I was able to handle things one-hundred-percent legitimately this time. It was Eretson again, trying to handle a bigger herd than he could afford to support and having the usual results." She gestured widely with the brush before returning to the task of currying her Frigid Unicorn.

Eret Eretson had the worst luck of any rancher Hiccup had ever heard of. His ability to unicorn-wrangle far outstripped his ability to care for all those unicorns, and so his herds languished if he couldn't find any buyers fast enough.

"My friends and I purchased about two-thirds of his stock - the best and the worst - found wild herds to release the best back into and brought the worst to the nearest green-flagged ranches. Simple and aboveboard."

"So...the Frigid here..." Hiccup gestured at the unicorn in question, which snorted a blast of frosty breath into his hair.

Valka laughed aloud. "Bewilderbeast? He likes you, I think..." Then she sobered. "The 'snowed-in road' was actually a seldom-traveled mountain pass. Cloudjumper and I had just sent the last few unicorns off with their new herd, and there was an avalanche just as we were starting back." She nodded at Bewilderbeast. "He shoved us into a cave just ahead of the worst of the snow, and stayed right there for days trapping our heat inside that cave so we didn't freeze. Used his horn magic to grow plants for Cloudjumper, too, so I could get by on my travel rations. I had to ride him out: Cloudjumper could have made it to safety that first day, but only alone - and by the time this glacier-with-hooves would let me on his back Cloudjumper was so stiff that he couldn't fly and needed to follow in a hardier unicorn's wake."

Hiccup stared in amazement at the great gray beast, which studied him soberly through dark gold eyes. Then he looked back at his mother. "Why?"

"Why do you think I named him _Bewilderbeast_? Two months of preparing heavier clothes and training him to carry me out of there, and I still don't have an answer for that." She smiled wryly. "What a whisperer, huh?"

Hiccup just shrugged. "I don't know...I still don't know why Toothless didn't just run off and leave me in that hole that day."


	12. The Answers

_Why do they like you?_

Confusion..._Who likes me?  
_

_The herd._

_Oh..._shy pleasure..._They like me? Good, because I like them. I respect them, like I do those of my own species._

Consideration. Then approval._  
_

_Um...can I ask you something?_

_You may._

_Why were you in those mountains two months ago? The herds of your kind usually run farther north than that, don't they?_

Something like an exasperated sigh._ I used to lead a herd. I was defeated by a young upstart. I went for a run, to expend my frustration. I had not decided what I would do when I saw the mountain-bounder with the scarred face, trying to outrun the snow. A strong, healthy buck, permitting a beast on his back...I wished to understand this._

Comprehension..._He told you about this place._

_A herd with no Dominant Horn. A land where displays of strength were permitted, but earnest fights were quickly stopped. Abundant food with no effort expended, space to run and available shelters against bad weather - and all the hoofed had to do was allow their manes to be combed and their horns trimmed, and occasionally lend their entire being to the control of one much weaker and slower than themselves.  
_

Amusement, thinking of the ranch master as being "weak." He was the biggest, strongest human on the ranch - but it was true, he was still about half the weight of even the smallest adult unicorn.

_Your kind is clever. You show our kind that we may trust you. Thus we do._

Sadness..._Not all of my kind. Some are terrible to your kind._

_This cloud-jumper tells me that no Terrible Ones are here, that the Dominant Horn of your kind will not permit it. I have seen his herd, and I believe. This herd is strong; I can make it diligent. We will be powerful, and your kind and mine will protect one another, and we will all outlast the Terrible Ones. This I promise.  
_

* * *

Bewilderbeast stepped back and walked away, calm and collected and quite as if he had _not_ had Hiccup backed into a corner of the paddock to question him.

Hiccup slumped against the fence, feeling drained - and his forehead felt like it had been branded all over again. Of all the things he'd expected from his second communion with a unicorn, he hadn't been ready for the sheer _weight_ of the Frigid's attention.

Perhaps the difference was the age; Toothless was a rather young adult, but Bewilderbeast was considerably older than five. _And_ he'd been a herd leader...if _that_ didn't have something to do with it too, Hiccup would eat his saddle.

"Are you okay?"

Hiccup turned to look at Fisk, who was sitting atop Meatlug with a rope on his saddle horn. "Mostly. Did you see what happened?"

"Yeah. I was trying to decide if I had to step in, but you seemed to have everything well in hand."

"That's one way to put it." Hiccup ran his hands through his hair, making it stand up.

"Headache?"

And paused. "Actually...no. Not really. My forehead feels kind of sunburned, but nothing I would consider serious enough to get the Tylenol." That was a little surprising; either he was getting used to non-human thoughts tramping through his head, or Bewilderbeast knew how to handle minds better than Toothless.

"You barely use Tylenol for headaches anyway," Fisk pointed out. "Mostly you just put Sharps on your head."

Thinking of Sharps reminded Hiccup of what had happened earlier that afternoon. "Do you know where Astrid is?"

"No, but it's almost dinnertime; she should be up at the Big House soon. Why?"

The mention of dinner and the memory of how big it always was suddenly made Hiccup ravenous as his tired brain fixated on food as the best way to restore its energy. For a moment he didn't even register that a question had been asked. "Um. No reason."

How could he explain to Fisk, anyway? The other boy's emotions were all connected back to Meatlug, he thought in statistics around everyone else, and he was lousy at keeping secrets.

* * *

"A little hungry there, are we?"

Hiccup blinked at Gobber's tease and looked around. He was standing in the chow line piling his plate high with food for the second time - and he had no conscious recollection of what he had eaten the first time. He thought he remembered Scott teasing him about "dinner mountain," and trying to snitch something...and he'd _snarled_ at Scott, like a dog ready to attack whatever was sneaking up on its food. Even more surprising than Harold Haddock growling at his bigger cousin, however, was that it had actually worked: he'd looked uneasily at Hiccup and went to get his own food from the kitchen.

"I think this'll be the last helping," he offered, smiling shyly at Gobber.

"Hey, you get whatever you need to fill up. You could use a few more pounds on you." The big man put another biscuit on Hiccup's plate - balancing it on top of a pile of shredded beef - and took himself off to the head table with a mug of beer.

Hiccup glanced around the room, but didn't see Astrid. With a shrug, deciding it could wait until he'd fully quieted the grumbling beast that was his stomach, he followed Gobber to the head table and settled between his parents.

"So, I had a thought about the unicorns' artifacts," he began, neatly tearing the biscuit in half and piling some beef on it.

"I wondered if you did," Valka said with a smile that was as much teasing as approving, "But I didn't like to interrupt you by asking when you were so obviously hungry."

Hiccup ducked bashfully and closed up the biscuit into a little sandwich. "It's about the hair. I know we don't use Inlanders' hair much..." He took a bite.

Stoik shook his head. "It's plenty strong and lightweight, and fire resistant to boot, but water nearly ruins it." He looked curious, though, and waited expectantly for Hiccup to finish his mouthful.

"But what if we plaited it with Black or Frigid hair? They'd be just as strong and light, and would counter that water weakness." He took another bite.

"They can't possibly be as fireproof as the other three unicorns'..." Stoik began. Then his face cleared. "But the Inlander hair would counter that in exchange, wouldn't it?"

"It would," Valka agreed, looking curious herself. No, more than curious: excited. "We're already braiding High- and Lowlander hair together for ropes; why not make ropes combining Inlander hair with strands from fire-horns' manes? In fact..." her eyes almost seemed to glow as something else occurred to her. Hiccup saw it at almost the same instant, and he nearly dropped his sandwich as he scrambled to get the words out.

"If we made a rope of all five types of unicorn hair together, they would be nearly indestructible!"

Valka nodded and gestured for Hiccup to keep eating, which he did with a vengeance. "Frigid hair probably counters Lowlander heaviness just as well as Highlander, and Black hair would strengthen Highlander hair just like the Low's! All five together would have an even balance of all five elements, and that would be..."

"I hate to interrupt, especially with a reality check," Gobber spoke up, "But we only have one Frigid and one Black. It would take years to make a fiver-plait rope of any significant length, even if you collected from their tail-tufts too and went for the thinnest thickness that was still practical."

Hiccup slumped a bit. "Still a good idea," he muttered around a mouthful, defiant even as he conceded the man's point.

"It is," Stoik agreed, patting Hiccup's shoulder, "And I think as long as you're gathering hair from those two you might as well make the rope. It'll be useful whenever it's finished - and, speaking as a practical businessman who will do anything ethical to keep this ranch afloat, if we ever need the money we can sell it for a very high price." He glanced at his son's plate and added, "Eat your veggies."

Hiccup speared a few green beans and folded them into his mouth, all the while wondering if Toothless would help him find wild Blacks and coax them to, if not outright be domesticated, at least allow him to comb their manes. That would help the rope project go faster, at least - especially if Bewilderbeast would help Valka find wild Frigids for the same purpose.

* * *

Hiccup finally caught up to Astrid, halfway between the Big House and the stable. "Astrid..."

"There you are," Astrid said by way of greeting, turning to look at him.

_So...she knew this conversation was coming?_ "Why...earlier...why did you..." he was reluctant to finish: Scott, Spencer, Bucket, and a lot of other hands were _right there_ and looking like they were pretending not to listen.

"Why did I give you a peck on the cheek?" Astrid shocked him by simply announcing, grinning wickedly at his expression, "I wanted to get your attention."

"You...I...that was just..." Astrid was a horrible tease. How on earth was he supposed to translate that?

"And it worked," she added, lifting her eyebrows.

Hiccup spread his hands. "As I recall, you _had_ my attention simply by being there. Why did you feel the need to...compound it?"

"Oh, I thought about saying what I wanted to say right then and there. Then I decided I'd rather wait." She shrugged carelessly.

"For...me to ask..." Hiccup thought that one over and hazarded, "...what was on your mind?"

"Not bad, but no."

"For me to ask..." Was she _really_ going to make him guess?

"Believe it or not, you don't have any overdue questions in my book. I guess I wanted...witnesses."

Hiccup glanced around - good grief, his _parents_ were standing there, honest enough to actually watch instead of pretending not to. He refocused on Astrid. "Why?"

Astrid considered. "Maybe I'm just territorial."

"Territor..." before his brain could finish processing - before his mouth could finish echoing the word - Astrid grabbed his collar and silenced him in the most classically romantic way possible.

A kiss.

Not just any kiss, either: her lips tugged at his, and teeth were involved in a way that seemed more like a real couples-kiss than something just friendly. It was a taste of lightning, robbing him of breath and reducing him to some low-level intelligence that seemed to understand exactly what Astrid meant by _territorial_ in this context - because this strange version of himself was feeling the same way.

_Mine, mine, mine..._

It was over too soon. Just as he was daring to kiss her back, she broke it off.

"Okay?" she asked, peering carefully into his eyes as though trying to see if he was still home.

Hiccup tried twice to say something; both times, nothing came out. Finally he managed to prompt some of his higher-level thinking processes back into a more functional state. "Right. Territorial. No problem."

A smile teased up at the corners of her mouth. "You alright?"

"Working on it."

She smiled fully, apparently pleased that she'd caused such a near-total crash. "I think that was building up for two years without my being aware of it."

"Two..." Hiccup stared in blank astonishment for a moment. Then a rather idiotic grin spread over his face. "I think I could tell." He _thought_ he wanted another one, but the more intelligent part of his brain was insisting that he would be in the dirt twitching like an electrocuted frog if he got another one.

Before the hound dog (or whatever the heck that was) could argue the genius back down, Astrid roughly patted Hiccup's shoulder and turned away. "See you tomorrow - babe."

"Right - back at you," Hiccup waved at her back, feeling about equal parts deflated and relieved. Then he spun around and stared at his dad, not quite sure what to say; fortunately it seemed he didn't have to say a word.

"That was exactly how Stoik looked when I first kissed him," Valka said in a tone that had elements of both reassurance and reminiscence, "And I'd had fewer witnesses."

"Good on you, Harry," Stoik said with a smile, "Good on you."


	13. Five Years Later

_**Author's Note:** I think I'm just about penned out for this one. If anybody wants one-shots they'd like to see with Toothless the Black Unicorn or anyone else on Berk Ranch, PM me with ideas. Otherwise, look out for more HTTYD fanfictions in other storyverses!_

* * *

The herd of Inlanders was in full stampede. They'd probably been scared by a griffin, or some other large predator.

A lot of the best unicorn hunters (best as in herd-health-conscious, not necessarily crack-shot or expert with a rope) considered a stampede to be a very high-risk, high-reward way to catch a unicorn. It was very, very dangerous to get too near a stampede: the whole herd could swerve towards a rider, and would run him down if he didn't get out of the way. At the same time, a skilled hunter could skirt the back of a herd and bring down stragglers - unicorns that would otherwise weaken the herd. It was natural selection at work, plain and simple, and if the hunter was looking to build his tame herd it even gave the doomed beasts a chance at survival they wouldn't otherwise have.

Harold Hannibal Haddock had grown into one of the best. Five years had given him an extra foot or so of height, lots of long bones and lean muscles; with his prosthetic firmly holding him to the left stirrup, he could stand up and throw a rope with Toothless at full gallop - almost as easily as if he were standing on solid ground - all without throwing off the movement of the false wing.

Toothless feinted up on one side of the lead Inlander, unnerving it enough to turn. The entire herd moved with it, making the sharp turn towards the distant shores where the Lowlanders lived. Most of them made the turn, anyway; a couple of rather young stags floundered helplessly, nearly falling over on their own before Hiccup had to do anything.

Both were properly down in a matter of seconds, a rope tangled around their hind legs. Hiccup had succeeded in lassoing one the normal way and then catching the other with a flick of the wrist. Pulling up beside them, he let Toothless trap one horn-to-horn and dismounted to "talk" to the other one.

_Calm, steady...everything's fine. All safe. Come with us._

The stag didn't want to hear it at first, didn't want to trust this strange squeaky creature and his black-coated horror. Eventually, though, he conceded that a real predator would have killed him by now and reluctantly agreed to stay close. Toothless got the same agreement from the other one, and Hiccup freed their legs and let them stand.

Five years had also given Hiccup a lot of practice at the low-level telepathy that seemed to be how all unicorns communicated. The very young and very old were easiest, although he had to handle their thoughts differently inside his head: the young blazed with raw emotions, while the old loomed with sheer presence. He liked to bring those to the ranch as often as possible, and altogether avoid handling new minds of the long-horned prime variety if he could. Sometimes he couldn't; sometimes Valka would bring him a unicorn in the summer of life and ask him to talk to it. It seemed she didn't have quite the same touch with unicorns that he did. But at least the long-horned ones she brought to him were also deeply wounded in spirit, and weren't interested in a clash of wills like the healthy prime unicorns were. Indeed, they needed their morale boosted.

As he neared the ranch with the two Inlanders behind him, Toothless suddenly lifted his head and sniffed the air. His mind nudged Hiccup's, offering a clear scent-picture of five Berkian unicorns and their riders. Stormfly, Cloudjumper, Grump, Gruff, and Thump; Astrid, Valka, Gobber, Mulder, and Buckingham.

They'd finished the standard round-up without him when he took off after the stampede, but waited for him before starting back.

It was a very hard idea to get used to, that at twenty Hiccup would be the new face of Berk Ranch. Even if he assumed that he would ever be taking the job, he thought the ranch would be his only _after_ his father had run it for at least another ten or fifteen years. But since the accident...

Stoik still lived, as did Bewilderbeast. But it was painful for both Valka and Hiccup to see the two of them, crippled beyond any ability to manage the herds in person. They kept each other company now, put to pasture years before they were ready to go but equally resigned to their fates. Stoik had no clear memory of the entire month before the disaster that had broken his neck: he barely remembered Hiccup gleefully telling him about Astrid being his future daughter-in-law, the day he'd proposed and she'd said yes. Bewilderbeast refused to be reminded, choosing to pretend the entire half-year before his legs were broken beyond repair simply didn't exist.

Skullcrusher, Stoik's Highlander, had been given to Eret Eretson - who vowed to care for the sturdy fellow like a brother under penalty of being haunted by the old cowboy after his death. The poor unicorn was a bit confused by the turn of events, but accepted a new rider readily enough; the 'Landers weren't like the fire-horns.

"I won't have it," Stoik had declared from his bed a few days after he finally woke up, "I won't have him pining away on my behalf. If he stays here he will wait and wait for me, and he won't understand why I don't come and mount. And don't try to tell me you can explain things to his satisfaction, Hiccup."

Hiccup hadn't even tried to argue. Even if he could have adequately explained the situation to Skullcrusher, he would have also communicated a heartache too deep to fully suppress. Despair was no better than ignorance, and was probably worse.

"Stop that," Valka chided softly as Hiccup and Toothless drew abreast of Cloudjumper.

"What?"

"You're thinking of your father again." Valka's own eyes held sorrow, but also love and pride. "It wasn't your fault, or Toothless's; Stoik made his choice, and there wasn't a thing anyone could do to stop him even if there had been time."

Hiccup shuddered slightly. "I still have the nightmares..."

"So do I. But we can't live in a land of 'if only,' Hiccup: the past is past, and we can't go back to change it."

Astrid came up on Hiccup's other side and leaned over to pat his shoulder. "When the road back is gone..."

Hiccup turned to smile at her. "...You just have to ride on."

And he couldn't think of anyone better to ride with than Astrid and Valka, nor a better unicorn than Toothless.


End file.
